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The Entrepreneurial Business 155

have a plan. Until then, we have “good intentions,” and what those are
good for, everybody knows.

These are the fundamental policies needed to endow a business with
entrepreneurial management; to make a business and its management
greedy for new things; to make it perceive innovation as the healthy,
normal, necessary course of action. Because it is based on a “Business
X-Ray”—that is, on an analysis and diagnosis of the current business,
its products, services, and markets—this approach also ensures that the
existing business will not be neglected in the search for the new, and
that the opportunities inherent in the existing products, services, and
markets will not be sacrificed to the fascination with novelty.
The Business X-Ray is a tool for decision making. It enables us,
indeed forces us, to allocate resources to results in the existing busi-
ness. But it also makes it possible for us to determine how much is
needed to create the business of tomorrow and its new products, new
services, and new markets. It enables us to turn innovative intentions
into innovative performance.
To render an existing business entrepreneurial, management must
take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather
than waiting for a competitor to do so. The business must be managed
so as to perceive in the new an opportunity rather than a threat. It
must be managed to work today on the products, services, processes,
and technologies that will make a different tomorrow.

III

ENTREPRENEURIAL PRACTICES
Entrepreneurship in the existing business also requires manageri-
al practices.
1. First among these, and the simplest, is focusing managerial
vision on opportunity. People see what is presented to them; what is
not presented tends to be overlooked. And what is presented to most
managers are “problems”—especially in the areas where performance
falls below expectations—which means that managers tend not to see
the opportunities. They are simply not being presented with them.
Management, even in small companies, usually get a report on oper-
ating performance once a month. The first page of this report always