Personal Bytes

I bought this book, entitled Management, by Luis Gomez-Meija et all, and I feel like sharing some thoughts.

To start off, it covers the most important topics of management but also the hottest ones, like entreperneurship or motivation. These are some delicate areas of management yet to be fully digged. Each topic is insightful but simply written, not standing a barrier for those with less knowledge on economics.

But what really impressed me were the stories about successful business man/woman. For example, how the two students from Stanford started their own business on their basement! That company is HP. Or how Michael Dell started selling computers on his bedroom and received a proposal from Disney. At age 21, Dell had already a company worth 20 million dollars!

And this poses a question: are these successful people or, further than that, entreperneurs? It depends on how you define entreperneurship. Being an entreperneur does not require you to invent a completely revolutionary product. The iPod was not a revolution but rather an innovation. And since innovation walks side-by-side with entreperneurship, it just comes to prove that it’s not just about relying on a supposedly revolutionary idea but on how you manage to explore it.
And both HP and Dell came to innovate. Dell, for instance, innovated by establishing a direct link between the customer and the product he was buying, meaning that there was one company for assembling and assuring everything was working fine. But definitely it wasn’t a revolution.
Nor I believe it was a signal of entreperneurship.

On the other hand, Steve Jobs — Apple’s CEO and co-founder — is an entreperneur. Like Michael Dell, he set a succesful business. Contrary to Dell, he keep on being succesful, in or out of Apple. When he was fired by Apple’s board of directors, he established Pixar — who made Toy Story, for example — and buit a technology, NeXT, which relieved $400 million dollars! When he came back to Apple, he made it get back on trail and its shares rose from some miserable $20 to $75 per share.