Destructive Exploitation: Entrepreneurial Opportunity

I’m in Silicon Valley at a conference of entrepreneurs—it’s an annual event and what’s remarkable is that attendance this year is 20% higher than last year! From my speaking and presentation involvement I get monthly corporate event planning magazines and newsletters from Fortune 500 companies that express a much different picture: generally corporate events are down as much as 50%. So what’s going on?...Two different stories using event participation as an indicator: Entrepreneurs are up 20% vs. corporate events are markedly down? The difference is that entrepreneurs see opportunity in turbulence while the corporate world feels fear and uncertainty. For entrepreneurs, these “troubling” times are exactly those times to exploit market niches that the incumbent “big boys” are too distracted, too time pressed, too resource starved to serve. When the “elephants” are herding “inward,” the gazelle-entrepreneurs are leaping, darting and accelerating into new markets and creating new opportunities. For entrepreneurs, it’s worthy to note that the incumbents are distracted by dealing with overbuilt infrastructures, organizational and functional redundancies and a “good enough” philosophy regarding their current menu of products and services. For entrepreneurs, it’s a buyers market for talent and human resources and to build their DNA for building a company for the future… For entrepreneurs the message is clear: what a great time to be a gazelle! About the author: Steven Stralser, Ph.D., is a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Thunderbird School of Global Management. He is the author of MBA in a Day: What You Would Learn at Top-Tier Business Schools (If You Only Had the Time!) and the developer of MBAinaDAY Online, the six-hour web-delivered e-learning program based on his book.