***Entrepreneurial Instincts

In the business world, the entrepreneur is a different breed. Part of the reason for this is that instinct often plays a big role in what an entrepreneur does and who he or she is. From conception - that "eureka" moment - through development and operations, businesses spawned of personal whim frequently play by different rules than the typical organization. Some businesses were obviously started on an impulse. What rational mind, for example, would conceive of a business like Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc., which handles extreme cleaning jobs, like biohazard spills and animal waste as well as murders and suicides. The business was started by Neal Smither of Orinda, California, who got the idea while watching the movie Pulp Fiction. "I was a downsized mortgage banker and looking for something to do when I watched the part of the movie where two characters had to clean up after a gruesome murder." Within a couple of years he had 17 employees and has turned the company into a successful franchise. The entrepreneur inhabits a quasi-mystical world of inspiration, innovation, and the subconscious, and is someone in touch with his or her "inner child". Like children, entrepreneurs can be impulsive, uninhibited, and relentlessly experimental. These qualities aren't exactly rampant in mainstream business. The Business Maverick in the Trenches of the Corporate BehemothnnFew situations better illustrate the essential differences between the entrepreneurial business and the traditional business than when a successful entrepreneur returns to the corporation. I know someone who made the transition from successful entrepreneur at the height of the dot-com boom to a whole different reality as an executive in a large company. As he often complains, there's a big difference between now and then. Now, he's constantly faced with the challenge of punching through the thickets of corporate bureaucracy. He says that because the corporate environment is so cumbersome and undynamic, good ideas requiring immediate action or "out of the box" thinking are inadvertently sabotaged. (Big business may claim to cherish innovation and personal initiative, but when the organizational culture is not equipped to allow such initiative, it's just so much talk.) When this dot-com entrepreneur headed up his own company, he had the freedom to be agile and boundlessly creative; things happened when he said they would. There was little if any barrier between thought and action. Often, it wasn't even a matter of thought, but instinct. He made split-second decisions that were definitely not based on any truly rational, deliberative process. Yet they turned out to be right far more often than not. At the core of any successful entrepreneur is someone who trusts his or her instincts and is right more often not.nn* * * The instinct of an entrepreneurial spirit is not some erratic, insurrectionary force. It is widely reflected within our society, and romanticized in popular fiction, blockbuster movies, even advertising spots that use action-oriented, pseudo-outlaw themes (e.g., "Just do it" and "Sometimes you gotta break the rules"). Hollywood and Madison Avenue, especially over the last 10 years, have tapped into the instinctual/entrepreneurial spirit that has long been an American ideal. To nurture your own entrepreneurial spirit, take Trump University's online course in entrepreneurship essentials. Learn more here.