The New Entrepreneurial Leader

Developing Leaders Who Shape Social and Economic Opportunity

In years past, the keywords for leaders were confidence, single-minded purpose, and strategic planning. But today’s vastly complex, globalized, and fast-evolving world requires a different kind of leadership. This game-changing book details a new approach—entrepreneurial leadership—developed at Babson College, the number-one school for entrepreneurship in the world. Entrepreneurial leadership is inspired by, but is separate from, entrepreneurship. It can be applied in any organizational situation, not just start-ups. Based on two years of extensive research, it embraces three principles that add up to a fundamentally new worldview of business and a new logic of decision making. First, rapid change and increasing uncertainty require leaders to be “cognitively ambidextrous,” able to shift between traditional “prediction logic” (choosing actions based on analysis) and “creation logic” (taking action despite considerable unknowns). Guiding this different way of thinking and acting is a new view of business, where simultaneous creation of social, environmental, and economic value is the order of the day. Finally, entrepreneurial leaders leverage their understanding of themselves and their social context to guide effective action. Each chapter offers concrete examples of how educators across all disciplines are integrating these ideas into their courses—and even their entire curricula. The New Entrepreneurial Leader lays out a comprehensive new paradigm for reinventing management education in order to mold leaders who will shape social and economic opportunity.