Is Being Entrepreneurial the Opposite of Being Strategic?
Note: This is a transcript of my speech at the annual awards banquet of the Graduate Engineering Student’s Consortium. University of Calgary, April 26, 2019.
What does it mean to be strategic in your entrepreneurship, and what does it mean to be entrepreneurial in your strategy? Can you even be both entrepreneurial and strategic? I think this is important to think about because a lot of us want to be both entrepreneurial and strategic in our life choices.
Being strategic typically involves planning ahead, carefully thinking everything through, not engaging in actions when you are likely to fail, and only engaging in action when a map is charted for the road ahead. Being strategic involves looking at your current strengths and weaknesses, your unique advantages, and choosing a course of action accordingly. Being strategic is about acting rationally and logically.
Being entrepreneurial on the other hand, often involves taking the risk to act despite the odds. A type of thinking that is sometimes summarized as “just do it” or “move fast and break things” (famous Facebook moniker from Mark Zuckerberg), which seems economically irrational. Just go ahead and start, go all in, even if you have no idea what will happen. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, says entrepreneurship is like jumping off a…
