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The Entrepreneurial Business 171

to stay on and did not find it difficult to look after a much older child.
The people who do not want to be anything but entrepreneurs are
unlikely to be in the employ of an existing business to begin with, and
even more unlikely to have been successful in it. And the people who
do well as entrepreneurs in an existing business have, as a rule,
proved themselves earlier as managers in the same organization. It is
thus reasonable to assume that they can both innovate and manage
what already exists. There are some people at Procter & Gamble and
at 3M who make a career of being project managers and who take on
a new project as soon as they have successfully finished an old one.
But most people at the higher levels of these companies have made
their careers out of “project management,” into “product manage-
ment,” into “market management,” and finally into a senior company-
wide position. And the same is true of Johnson & Johnson and of
Citibank.
The best proof that entrepreneurship is a question of behavior,
policies, and practices rather than personality is the growing number
of older large-company people in the United States who make entre-
preneurship their second career. Increasingly, middle- and upper-level
executives and senior professionals who have spent their entire work-
ing lives in large companies—more often than not with the same
employer—take early retirement after twenty-five or thirty years of
service when they have reached what they realize is their terminal job.
At fifty or fifty-five, these middle-aged people then become entrepre-
neurs. Some start their own business. Some, especially technical spe-
cialists, set up shop as consultants to new and small ventures. Some
join a new small company in a senior position. And the great majori-
ty are both successful and happy in their new assignment.
Modern Maturity, the magazine of the American Association of
Retired Persons, is full of stories of such people, and of advertisements
by new small companies looking for them. In a management seminar
for chief executive officers that I ran in 1983, there were fifteen such
second-career entrepreneurs (fourteen men and one woman) among the
forty-eight participants. During a special session for these people, I
asked them whether they had been frustrated or stifled while working
all those years for big companies, as “entrepreneurial personalities” are
supposed to be. They thought the question totally absurd. I then asked
whether they had much difficulty changing their roles; they thought this
equally absurd. As one of them said—and all the others nodded
assent—”Good management is good management, whether you run a