This essay discusses the five most important lessons for today's entrepreneurial manager. It brings emphasis to the fact that effective leadership abilities are essential for business-savvy managers to steer and organize a company. The ability to attract various actors to the enterprise's development depends on these talents as well. Additionally, it demonstrates how partnership management aids in establishing crucial alliances that advance the company and aid in comprehending the political climate in many contexts, from local to multinational. As for innovation concept skills, it is essential for enterprise growth and therefore an enterprising manager with these skills to handle everyday hurdles. The ideas need have inherent logic and clarity if the enterprise is to thrive.
However, in terms of business planning and marketing, enterprising managers need to acquit themselves with business skills to continually learn of new emerging business opportunities. For organizational development, Enterprising managers need to adopt Enterprise Architecture Management to help them plan, guide, and coordinate enterprise transformation. The study finds that organizations can promote development of enterprising managers by recognizing their value then using destination role to help them understand their duties and training talented leaders to develop their skills.
Introduction
Enterprising managers must learn some lessons if they are to be successful. Some, for example, Sledzik (2013), claim that it is required of enterprising managers to elucidate and demonstrate the innovative concepts of the enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the five key lessons of today's enterprising manager. This essay is divided into two main sections. It will first consider the five key lessons of today's enterprising manager. This section gives a brief background to the topic and defines the term enterprising manager. It is divided into five subsections with each discussing one of the five key lessons. The first subsection discusses leadership. The second subsection discusses partnership and management. The third are the innovative concept skills. The fourth are business planning and marketing and finally, the fifth is organizational development. Finally, in the last section, some conclusions will be drawn from the findings discussed.
Five Key Lessons of Today's Enterprising Manager
The workforce environment has substantially changed over the past decades. The employee groups have become more diverse while firms have become more global with more collaborative and less hierarchical organizational structures. For these reasons, enterprising individuals have become critical to these changing organizational structures to propel organizational success. An enterprising manager can be described as a person who likes to persuade, influence, manage, and work with people to achieve organizational goals or promote economic gain (Demidova et al., 2014, p. 80). These managers have an enterprising personality that enjoys status, power, money, and being in charge. Some of the characteristics of these personality types include confidence and assertiveness. An enterprising manager is energetic, extroverted, assertive, confident, and a quick decision-maker. The possible occupations that fit into these managers focus on carrying out projects and start-ups. Some of the significant facets these managers need to learn and acquire include leadership, partnership management, the innovative concept skills, business planning and marketing, and organizational development.
Leadership
Efficient leadership skills within enterprises can promote the building of community level support, understanding business aspects to negotiating with markets and government actors (Tokyo, Pawlak & Rantanen 2015, p. 45). An enterprising manager needs to adopt efficient leadership skills and show continuity and commitment in leading and coordinating the enterprise. For instance, all start-ups will need a dominant leader who can coordinate the business and help the rest of the workforce to function and develop through the many developmental stages to success. One will need also to have a deep understanding of the cross-sectorial issues, as well as, give constant attention to both public and private investments. Developing the ability to deal with governments is a critical part of leadership since the individual gets to weave through bureaucracy, work collaboratively with different ministries and governmental levels. For these reasons, an enterprising manager can pull these actors to contribute to developing the enterprise. Most importantly, the enterprise manager needs to spread these leadership responsibilities and skills to the rest of the workforce to ensure long-term sustainability in case of changes in leadership.
Partnership Management
Partnership management is the ability of an individual to maintain and negotiate core relationships to benefit the enterprise. Partnerships demand attention for their continuity and the realization of benefits by the partners involved. Partnerships offering intangible benefits or not well financially resourced may suffer from an unequal participation of the partners. On the contrary, if these partners work collectively, their expertise and knowledge can contribute to the enterprise's success. The skills required in start-ups originate from these partnerships and may include engineering and technical expertise, legal advice, training, marketing, and business planning (Schultheiss, Wieners & Wolf 2014, p. 86-92). Importantly, an enterprising manager will be required to possess national policy and local implementation skills to work across a range of partners and ensure the enterprise has access to the right people with the desired skills to enable the enterprise to thrive. Adopting these skills will promote knowledge and an understanding of the political climate and local key policy, national and international economy. To address partnership management, the enterprising individual can incorporate cross-cultural communication and information networks skills (Turner & Pennington 2015, p. 445). One needs to develop a global mindset to have international work experience and appreciate diversity. Developing cultural intelligence is also vital to address the differences in the preferred leadership style in different world regions. For instance, some regions such as India may prefer the authoritarian leadership style. Therefore, being culturally fluent can ease the process of entering a new context and mastering norms. Ultimately, an enterprising manager can become a global leader by learning to be effective in cultural code-switching.
Innovative Concept Skills
Innovation in the enterprise can drive business growth. However, the demonstration of the innovative concept is crucial to depict the viability of commercializing a service or product. According to Sledzik (2013, p. 10), an enterprising manager needs to clarify and prove the innovative concept of the enterprise. One needs to offer a clear description of the concept, test and validate it to demonstrate that the idea has market potential (Bruce, Barringer & Duane 2016, p. 35). For instance, start-up enterprises may be somehow linked to earlier projects or gain support from overseas development assistance or through international project funding and may need justification. The enterprising manager can develop recognition and reward programs to aid in the endorsement of the concept hence giving a significant signal of the idea having merits and opening up opportunities with the investors or donors who would have otherwise viewed the enterprise as a risky venture (Drucker 2014, p. 25-30). The enterprise idea needs to have an inherent logic and clarity. For instance, when a service or product is known and the demand recognized, an enterprise successfully thrives. In contrast, where enterprises have new services and products that require introduction, explanation, and promotion to the markets, greater risks may be encountered. Enterprising individuals need to have innovation management skills to handle the common hurdles of enterprises. These challenges may entail resource changes, prototyping progress, incorrect sizing, and testing outcomes. Utilizing the circle of innovation that comprises desirability, feasibility, and viability can help mitigate these challenges (Sledzik 2013, p. 3-10). Some of the forces that can drive innovation include Porter's five forces that shape the business strategy. Other forces may include the digital revolution, commoditization, globalization, social media, and the turbulent world and acceleration.
Business Planning and Marketing
There is great accessibility to a wide range of business skills during start-ups. However, there is a lack of marketing skills, particularly in understanding the marketing processes, locating the buyers, and attracting clients (Blackburn, Hart & Wainwright 2013, p. 25). As a result, the acquaintance of new business skills should be acknowledged as a continuous endeavor that presents the capacity to learn about new rising business opportunities. Start-up enterprises that have identified marketing and business planning support inject into their success. An enterprising individual can promote the establishment of business plans that demonstrate that the enterprise is establishing objectives, service lines, and products and developing supply chains while identifying the revenue targets, marketing strategies, and the investment and financing requirements to meet these goals (Decker et al. 2014, p. 5-7). One of the critical success factors of enterprises is investment. Therefore, an enterprising individual needs to understand the demands of investors and recognize any possible barriers to investment to ensure the growth of the business. Such skills can be vested in both the leader and the partners in the enterprise who can provide marketing and business planning support (Demidova et al. 2014, p. 78). While partaking in these roles, the enterprising managers can demonstrate their access to various skills, how they are making use of them, and training on specific skills to enhance the proper functioning of the enterprise.
Organizational Development
Organizations can help support enterprising individuals to acquire these attributes. According to Hauder et al. (n.d.), EAM, Enterprise Architecture Management, has become a valuable means for organizations to plan, guide, and coordinate the continuous transformation of organizations. Therefore, its adoption can better define the roles of enterprising managers. An enterprise architecture, EA, can align the business goals with applications, technology, and data. EAM can generate benefits such as data management benefits, which include reduced data redundancy and reduced costs (Espinosa, Boh & DeLone 2011). The EA presents enterprising managers with a system model to interact with and draw guidance on their approach to various business operations.
According to Prosci 2009, organizations looking forward to incorporating enterprising individuals in their transformation can approach the change in three ways. Firstly, Enterprise Change Management, ECM, can be approached through a project-centric approach. This approach is related to business planning and sequencing, to which projects are the first to apply change management. This approach calls for the development of business planning skills among enterprising managers to strategically plan for organizational activities (Kuratko, Hornsby & Covin 2014, p. 38-45). Moreover, firms can utilize a skill-centric approach. This approach focuses on the development of competencies and skills required for change management. A company focuses on training enterprising individuals while addressing the project needs to build the skills associated with the project. The approach, therefore, leverages the distinct roles and responsibilities that can be carried out by project team members, senior managers, and leaders. Ultimately, firms, through a holistic approach, can address the attributes of enterprising managers. Prosci points out that the skills-centric and project-centric approaches can present merits and certain risks. However, a holistic approach can address these approaches and the elements of structure and process (Prosci 2009). There are five areas where firms can develop tactics to improve organizational reaction and manage change. They include process, structure, skill, project, and leadership.
Conclusion
An organization can promote the development of enterprising managers by recognizing the value of strong leadership during economic downturn and boom. The first approach a firm may use would be to begin with the destination role and help the enterprise managers have a keen understanding of their roles (Kuratko, Hornsby & Covin 2014, p. 46). Besides, it may choose to identify talented leaders and place them in structured training to develop their skills and competencies. Ultimately, this process of leadership development can reflect the company culture in both the managers and employees who learn from their leaders and promote efficient enterprise management.
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