Rita Gunther McGrath is an Associate Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business. The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty, by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan, is a new publication from the Harvard Business School Press.

Q: Early on in your professional career, you embarked on entrepreneurial ventures. What were they?

A: My first [business venture] was in political consulting. It revolved around computerized list management - specifically around voters who vote in the primaries. It did very well the first year and made money. But the second year, we were asking ourselves, 'where did everyone go?' There is a very simple answer [to this question]: Elections run in cycles! This was something we hadn't considered - and it was a very good business lesson [in preparation and analysis].

The second venture was a business named Unworried Words [that focused on] typing, word processing, etc. It was close to a Kinkos idea. I was still an inexperienced entrepreneur, but the business grew out of things that I had done well. Unworried Words was quite successful; I even received the offer of a loan from the Small Business Association, but I was offered another job and decided to take it.

Q: This book offers many tips on recognizing new business opportunities, but is entrepreneurship necessarily something that can be learned?

A: You can't learn the passion, ambition, and drive. But there are definitely things that can be learned and this applies to everyone, whether they are corporate managers or anything else. You can be very smart, but if you don't have practice, you will encounter problems. Going back to my experiences in the political consulting business, there are so many lessons [to be learned]: how to create opportunities, how to get other people enthused and engaged, how to create an organization as a matter of course, [and even] how to pick new products and services.

~ Q: From your research, can you give me an example of a great corporate venture?

A: I would say that Texas Instruments' Radio Identification Business (TIRIS) is an example of a very interesting venture. The way it was managed reflects a number of important principles. The champion of this new business basically set out on a crusade, but he did it intelligently and parsimoniously. In effect, he launched hundreds of experiments. Most failed. Some produced enormous growth potential. For Texas Instruments as a whole, the last few years have involved enormous change, and the way the company approached it is an interesting example of how to become more focused and entrepreneurial as a company.

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Consider the difficult decision by Texas Instruments (TI) to sell what had been its core business: products and services for the?military defense market. This business had driven much of TI's success over the years and had been home to many of its most senior executives, including former chief executive officer, Jerry Junkins. Upon Junkin's sudden and untimely death in 1996, his successor, Thomas Engibous, completely refocused the company on businesses related to digital signal processing (DSP). In 1997, TI sold its notebook computer business to Acer, its defense electronics business to Raytheon, and its enterprise applications business to Sterling. In 1998, the company sold the memory chip business to Micron technology and began to make acquisitions in DSP-oriented companies such as Amati Communications. The resulting focused portfolio of businesses was seen by stock market analysts and other observers as having high potential, and TI's market capitalization has climbed steadily upward ever since.

- Excerpt From Chapter 7: "Selecting Your Competitive Terrain"

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Q: What - if any - is the gap between academia and the "real world" of business?

A: Our MBA curriculum at Columbia has more and more come to embrace entrepreneurship. Today, entrepreneurship is much more integrated with the general business program; we want every course to deal intelligently with entrepreneurial questions.

That said, as professors and researchers, we have a different role to play. We would be doing a disservice if we weren't very involved and knowledgeable about different technologies. But academics have an enormous privilege: We get to read, and learn, and reflect. A business person doesn't have this privilege; he or she has no time.

~ Q: In your opinion which fields currently have the most room for entrepreneurship?

A: There is room for growth within any industry. Everyone gets fascinated with the original concept - then there is the hard, gut-wrenching work on the operational side. B2B and dot-coms are the hot companies now. My pick would be any technologies that have a direct and immediate effect on one's life. For example, tags that your child can wear that will tell you where he is at any time. Such [practical] technologies lend peace of mind and reassurance - and I believe there is tremendous untapped potential here. [I would also add that] B&B has a lot of running room - so do mobile phone devices.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to mention about the book?

A: The book is meant to be something you can use and apply right away. Skim it, try it, come back to it. With few exceptions, nothing in this book is meant to be wrenching. You can get a lot of mileage out of the book without launching major disruptive change - which is good because everyone is overwhelmed. Managers have to answer 80 emails before lunch, etc. You're frozen in the headlights. My job has been to come up with concepts that are simple and don't require overhauls. Entrepreneurs don't spring out of the earth and become Microsoft. The key is to launch new ideas - and not to get killed while you're doing it.

Interview by Chandra Prasad, Editor-at-Large, Vault.com

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The following is an excerpt From Chapter 12 of the Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

Entrepreneurial Leadership

Your most important job as an entrepreneurial leader is not to find new opportunities or to identify the critical competitive insights. Your task is to create an organization that does these things for you as a matter of course. You will have succeeded when everyone in the organization takes it for granted that business success is about a continual search for new opportunities and a continual letting go of less productive activities. You will have succeeded when everyone feels that he or she has not only the right but the obligation to seek out new opportunities and to make them happen. You will have succeeded when the hallways buzz with energy, when people come to work excited, and when they are proud to be associated with your dynamic organization. And, of course, you will have succeeded when the value you create within your organization translates into stakeholder wealth.

~ This chapter focuses on how your behavior as an entrepreneurial leader impacts the search for opportunity in your organization. What distinguishes leaders who are capable of sustained and significant business revitalization from other managers is their personal practices on the job. These practices fall into three broad categories: practices that set the work climate, practices that orchestrate the process of seeking and realizing opportunities to grow the business, and hands-on practices that involve problem solving with the people at work on a particular venture. We'll discuss each in turn, but before doing so we stress that these practices are important for creating an entrepreneurial mindset in general-irrespective of whether a specific new business model is being created. The practices we describe below are important for establishing a pervasive spirit and a willingness to seek out and grasp entrepreneurial initiative throughout your business.

The problem with launching new business models is that everything about a new business model is likely to be out of whack with the business model of your existing core business. The more the new business opportunities differ from the model in your base business, the more difficult it will be for people used to the existing model to understand them. Unless, and only unless, you pay attention to resolving the discontinuities between the new models and the base business, the very forces that made the old business model successful will tend to preserve it to the detriment of the business models you are creating (or reinventing, in the case of a major reconfiguration of your existing models).

Although the General Electric Company may be overused as an example these days, the reason is probably that it is one of the best examples of a leading team's having systematically created an entrepreneurial mindset at every level. GE's Jack Welch has proven to be a master at this in the two decades that he has been at the head of the company. He reduces the paralyzing effects of uncertainty through leadership. He isn't afraid to tell people what they should focus on. At the same time, his organization frees people to capitalize on new opportunities through structures that encourage entrepreneurial behavior and the tools and training to make entrepreneurial behavior effective. Does it work? We think so.

~ Welch summarizes his philosophy for managing in today's world as follows: "You can't predict anymore. But that doesn't matter-what is important is that you must be able to adapt and exploit-be agile enough to guess where the value is going and position yourself to exploit it if it does."2 Let's move on to what you'll need to do.

Climate-Setting Practices

The goal behind climate setting is to create for everyone in the business a pervasive sense of urgency to be working on the next new business initiative. Everyone, from the CEO to the shipping room staff, must be clear that searching for entrepreneurial opportunities is urgent and is everyone's responsibility. Profitable growth becomes everyone's charter.

To foster such a climate, the most important thing you can do is behave as you would like your people to behave, and to model this behavior consistently, predictably, and relentlessly. Not everyone can be charismatic. Anyone can, however, learn to be doggedly persistent in modeling the behavior he or she wants others to adopt. This is a timeless principle, taught in every historically great school for leadership-people will heed your behavior and follow your example, but they will not change what they do on the basis of words alone.

The most important behavior on your part involves dedicating a disproportionate share of your own time, attention, and discretionary resources to creating new business models. Existing businesses, and the leaders in charge of them, face little difficulty in articulating their needs, building a case for their support, and attracting people. Entrepreneurial initiatives, on the other hand, are usually seen as marginal or unimportant in their early stages. Unless you personally allocate to them disproportionate attention, disproportionate resources, and disproportionate talent, they will get squeezed by the existing business to the extent that they never have a chance to take off. Your challenge is to provide counterpressure to the inertial forces that lead your people to constantly attend to the demands of today's business.