Entrepreneur Is a Verb - Unorthodox MBA Notion

by , May 1, 2010

beatvit is a Beat The GMAT community member who is currently enrolled in George Washington Universitys Part-Time MBA program. He will be regularly contributing articles to share his perspective of life as a part-time MBA student. Be sure to check out his blog, or ask him questions about his experiences in this forum thread.

Tuesday class in Entrepreneurship was a blast. Professor has been teaching it since mid-seventies, so he can afford to be unorthodox. There were quite a few ideas he introduced in the class that would probably not fly if he was a younger member of the faculty. But this is a charm of having a seasoned educator, as long as he keeps his interest in teaching students, even if in his own non-conformist way.

Since professor's undegraduate and masters degrees were in psychology, significant part of his lecture was around that subject. He introduced three major drivers of business people (humans in general?):

• Need for achievement
• Need for power (to influence other people)
• Need for affiliation (to be around people)

On these three basic needs he made distinctions between the executives and entrepreneurs. Obviously the entrepreneurs are big on the need for achievement, whereas executives are more interested in the remaining two. He also made a remark that university faculty are big on need for power, according to some research :)

Another topic he was talking about was the traits of the entrepreneurs.You can self-evaluate how you stack up on these, if you are interested in entrepreneurship. Here they are from my class notes:

• Commitment, determination, perseverance
• Persistent problem solving
• Seeking feedback
• Risk-taking (moderate risk in their own eyes, but sometimes exorbitant in the eyes of the people around)
• Tolerance for failure
• High energy level
• Autonomy (being their own boss)
• Optimism

He also talked about the Locus of Control, i.e. what a person believes is the cause of outcomes in his life, and therefore whether s/he is driven by external or internal motivation. Apparently this is also an important distinction of entrepreneurs, who are internally driven and believe that everything depends on them and they can influence the world around them. He gave us test on Locus of Control based on the original Rotter's Scale. I ended up just on the border of the internal and external locuses. So it probably means I still have a chance to become my own boss after the MBA. :)

I was not able to find the exact same questionnaire on the internet, but there are quite a few of other derivatives available. If interested, just google Locus of Control test and you will find a bunch.

Speaking of the word google used as a verb. The professor told us that he is probably the only one in academia who uses the word entrepreneur as a verb. For which he is being frowned upon by some of his colleagues. He demonstrated usage of the word by the example, "You can entrepreneur everything."

That's it for the first class in Entrepreneurship. If I say another word from the lecture, GWSB will ask me for their cut of tuition fee which I would have to collect from you. :)