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The Entrepreneurial Business 169

and attitudes of top management people, and especially of the chief
executive.* Of course, any top management can damage and stifle
entrepreneurship within its company. It’s easy enough. All it takes is
to say “No” to every new idea and to keep on saying it for a few
years—and then make sure that those who came up with the new
ideas never get a reward or a promotion and become ex-employees
fairly swiftly. It is far less certain, however, that top management
personalities and attitudes can by themselves—without the proper
policies and practices—create an entrepreneurial business, which is
what most of the books on entrepreneurship assert, at least by impli-
cation. In the few short-lived cases I know of, the companies were
built and still run by the founder. Even then, when it gets to be suc-
cessful the company soon ceases to be entrepreneurial unless it
adopts the policies and practices of entrepreneurial management.
The reason why top management personalities and attitudes do not
suffice in any but the very young or very small business is, of course,
that even a medium-sized enterprise is a pretty large organization. It
requires a good many people who know what they are supposed to
do, want to do it, are motivated toward doing it, and are supplied
with both the tools and continuous reaffirmation. Otherwise there is
only lip service; entrepreneurship soon becomes confined to the
CEO’s speeches.
And I know of no business that continued to remain entrepreneur-
ial beyond the founder’s departure, unless the founder had built into
the organization the policies and practices of entrepreneurial man-
agement. If these are lacking, the business becomes timid and back-
ward-looking within a few years at the very latest. And these compa-
nies do not even realize, as a rule, that they have lost their essential
quality, the one element that had made them stand out, until it is per-
haps too late. For this realization one needs a measurement of entre-
preneurial performance.
Two companies that were entrepreneurial businesses par excel-
lence under their founders’ management are good examples: Walt
Disney Productions and McDonald’s. The respective founders, Walt
Disney and Ray Kroc, were men of tremendous imagination and drive,
each the very embodiment of creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative
thinking. Both built into their companies strong operating day-to-day

*The best presentation of this viewpoint is in Rosabeth M. Kanter’s The Change
Masters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).