Everything we have written is designed to help you. But it may help you to know a little bit about us, as you go about applying these lessons.
It all begins when Len, a long-time professor at the Harvard Business School, returned to academia as the 12th President of Babson College in July 2009. For as long as there had been rankings Babson was No. 1 for entrepreneurship education.
But no one recently had stopped to say what are we really talking (and teaching) about?
So he began a process that involved the entire community. No surprise that most of the faculty were much more aligned with their disciplines (finance, operations research, arts and sciences, etc.) than they were with a theme of entrepreneurship. In one of these meetings, Professor Danna Greenberg summarized her feelings on the matter. “My training is in Organizational Behavior. My professional peers are in Organizational Behavior. My future career path is in Organizational Behavior. I teach Organizational Behavior daily. I don’t teach entrepreneurship and I probably never will. But I’m delighted to say that I teach under the umbrella of Entrepreneurial Thought and Action®.
Over the next few weeks this idea and phrase caught on with the rest of our faculty and staff, and with one or two exceptions became accepted. So we thought it would be a good idea if we figured out what Entrepreneurial Thought and Action really was, beyond the definition. We thought the best way to learn something is to try to teach it.
And that is where we will pick up next time.