ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP

Entrepreneur Leadership

Entrepreneur Leadership

Introduction

Entrepreneurship involves the creation of new organizations outright or within existing organizations. This innovative activity is undertaken by entrepreneurs who see and understand customer needs, find and combine resources, develop innovative solutions, take risks, and strive to make a profit. The rates of entrepreneurial activity vary by local and national environment, industry, and other factors. Compared to the rest of the population, entrepreneurs tend to have a stronger need for achievement, higher risk-taking propensity, and greater perseverance, more commitment to a task, bigger vision, higher creativity, and more tolerance for ambiguity. Individuals who want to become entrepreneurs also tend to have more positive attitudes toward risk and independence. Entrepreneurial leadership represents a complex and compound topic. The individual must possess skills and attributes of both an entrepreneur and a leader. The successful entrepreneurial leader must consider the organizational culture as well as the opinions and feelings of the follower population. The paper discusses two leading entrepreneurs to determine their entrepreneurial approaches (Nopo & Valenzuela, 2007).

Profit-Oriented Entrepreneur

The leader that I have chosen for this section is the former pioneer of the famous Apple Company. The characteristics of Steve Jobs leadership qualities that will most vividly exemplify his legacy are revealed in his vision for emerging technologies, his ability to collaborate with other great leaders, and his insatiable appetite for excellence.

The Visionary

Steve Jobs was first and foremost a visionary, once saying he wanted to, “put a ding in the Universe.” In 1983, Steve Jobs famously allured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” (Sheen, 2009).

It is spell binding to reflect on the vision Jobs and his team at Apple had back in the early 80's. The release of the iPhone 4S, just one day before his passing, quietly introduced Siri, an application that allows voice dialogue with your iPhone—a vision first revealed nearly 25 years ago in a video released internally at Apple. The narrative told the story of a man interacting with a technologically advanced device, using touch screen features, video conferencing, cyber-links, and voice interaction. The projected time of the story being told in the video was during the fall of 2011—exactly the time Apple would introduce the culmination of all of these technological advances in one device, just before losing the man that willed them into being.

Jobs is also listed as inventor, either primary inventor or co, of around 338 U.S. patents or patent applications that are related to a wide array of technologies, ranging from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based technologies). More than his inventions, Jobs reminds us that great leaders don't just announce a vision, but they live the vision—even as they pass through the shadows of death (Imbimbo, 2009).

The Collaborator

Of course Jobs did not make this vision come to fruition all on his own—Apple itself is a company ...