Start with means
What is this?
Everyone in the world has 3 categories of means available: Who you are, what you know and who you know. The resources you possess are the sum of the three above mentioned categories. The question is: what effects can you generate using these resources? An effectual entrepreneur now starts imagining possible outcomes and courses of action, of which the outcome is usually highly uncertain. The effectual entrepreneur adjusts his goals to his available means, giving him the unbeatable advantage of being receptive for opportunities and flexible course changes.We could not explain this better than how Stuart Read et al. describe how it works in their book Effectual entrepreneurship:
"To see how this means-driven process works, consider examples from the history of entrepreneurship. Be it Sears, Staples, Starbucks or CNN, the entrepreneurs who founded them worked closely with their means to shape step-by-step the opportunities they ended up with. The beginnings of those opportunities, however, were usually rooted in the way entrepreneurs wove together the mundane realities of who they were, what they knew and whom they knew into projects that they personally believed were worth doing. Those enduring ventures tended to start small, without elaborate market analyses. The entrepreneurs then continually added on to their original projects, pushing them outward, reshaping them to work with new stakeholders, stretching themselves - just a bit at a time, to reach higher and thrust farther - until eventually they transformed both their means and ends into unimagined new possibilities." The key take-away of this principle is this: setting yourself the goal to be a millionaire at age forty does not tell you what to do on day one. Starting with what you have on the other hand, is obvious, practical and does not exclude becoming successful.
"To see how this means-driven process works, consider examples from the history of entrepreneurship. Be it Sears, Staples, Starbucks or CNN, the entrepreneurs who founded them worked closely with their means to shape step-by-step the opportunities they ended up with. The beginnings of those opportunities, however, were usually rooted in the way entrepreneurs wove together the mundane realities of who they were, what they knew and whom they knew into projects that they personally believed were worth doing. Those enduring ventures tended to start small, without elaborate market analyses. The entrepreneurs then continually added on to their original projects, pushing them outward, reshaping them to work with new stakeholders, stretching themselves - just a bit at a time, to reach higher and thrust farther - until eventually they transformed both their means and ends into unimagined new possibilities." The key take-away of this principle is this: setting yourself the goal to be a millionaire at age forty does not tell you what to do on day one. Starting with what you have on the other hand, is obvious, practical and does not exclude becoming successful.
A short story and video on starting with your means in practice
- In this story, a a physicist and sailor manages to figure out the right partnerships in order to succeed with his plan to capture energy from ocean waves. This is the pdf.
- In this video, Stuart Read explains the principle using Freitag as a case, enjoy!
REFERENCES
- Effectual entrepreneurship by Stuart Read et al, 2011, Routledge