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    The Entrepreneurial Mindshift: Keys to unlocking your entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial potential
    The Entrepreneurial Mindshift: Keys to unlocking your entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial potential
    The Entrepreneurial Mindshift: Keys to unlocking your entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial potential
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    The Entrepreneurial Mindshift: Keys to unlocking your entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial potential

    By Dr Renate Volpe

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    About this ebook

    Whether you are building your own business, a product or even a division within a business, one of the major factors contributing to long-term success, is your mindset during the process of building. The old maxim that your attitude determines your altitude does not give us specifics as to what comprises a so-called good attitude. What role do self-esteem and self-confidence play in one's success?

    In her book, "The Entrepreneurial Mindshift", Dr Renate Volpe brings a clarity and structure to understanding the mindset required to succeed as either an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. Her 30 years of experience in the corporate environment, combined with her academic influence, provide highly pragmatic insights into the role played by both relationships and trust in creating a path of success.

    As a psychologist, an entrepreneur and a leadership coach, Renate has honed in on self-esteem and self-confidence as pivotal elements of the entrepreneurial mindset. Renate also sheds light on the role of fear in holding us back and encourages the reader to take risks.

    In an ever-changing world, our environment will produce new opportunities and new challenges. This book deals elegantly with the tools needed to cope in this fluid state. As someone who believes that success has far more to do with how one views one's world, rather than the ability to create a well-presented business plan. I was encouraged by this book.

    There is richness in the thinking behind the writing, that can only come from someone who has been there, tripped a few times and gotten up again and again. Renate's personal experience, enhanced by years of experience gained through her clients, has been distilled into this important work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDr Renate Volpe
    Release dateMay 18, 2018
    ISBN9781386792239
    The Entrepreneurial Mindshift: Keys to unlocking your entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial potential
    Author

    Dr Renate Volpe

    Dr. Renate Volpe is an expert in the field of strategic leadership and people development.  She is unique in that she has solid experience in the world of business, combined with a deep understanding of the world of academia as well as being a successful entrepreneur and author.  She has spent the last 20 years specialising in the field of female career development. Renate is a renowned public speaker who is best known for her publications The Entrepreneurial Mindshift and Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks. 

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      Book preview

      The Entrepreneurial Mindshift - Dr Renate Volpe

      1

      CONTEXT

      You must begin to trust yourself. If you do not, then you will forever be looking to others to prove your own merit to you and you will never be satisfied. You will always be asking others what to do, and at the same time resenting those from whom you seek such aid.

      Jane Roberts

      Introduction

      I wrote this book as a challenge to the short-term, bottom-line driven corporate mindset that so pervades our working lives. It reflects what so many disempowered employees tell me every day: Stress, an autocratic corporate culture, centralised decision-making, poor communication and arbitrary political agendas lead to ill health, low morale, depression and even suicide. I hope to help the reader find the courage and wisdom to enhance participation-processes and respectful communication, and to insist on honesty and truth in interaction.

      When people ask me why I continue with the difficult and exhausting task of attempting to bring respect for humanity to the working world, my answer is the following: We have a choice, the choice is to either continue with the old financial-based capitalism, which yields diminishing returns, or commit to the new human and information-based capitalism, which yields potentially infinite returns. There exists a growing body of research-evidence to support the ‘Tomorrow’s Company’ contention that relationship and consistent values are the key to long-term shareholder value. Companies that are built to last have in common a clear mission; continuity of values; actions consistent with values; investment in people; objectives beyond profit; and investment for long-term gain.

      A story I like to tell (originally told by Joel Barker) expresses my sentiments beautifully. One day an old man was walking along a stretch of beach. In the distance he saw a figure that appeared to be dancing. Upon closer inspection, he saw that a young man was throwing starfish back into the ocean. The man approached the young man and asked cynically: ‘Why bother, the beach is littered with thousands of starfish?’ The young man looked at the older man, picked up a starfish at his feet and threw it into the ocean. He then looked the older man in the eye and said: ‘It made a difference to that one!’

      My wish for you, dear reader, is to be courageous and authentic and to go out there and make a difference.

      Old and New Psychological Contracts

      For two decades, I functioned as a highly ambitious, successful corporate animal. Towards the end of this period I made the shift to intrapreneur as Director of the Strategic Business Unit for the Centre for Human Development, which at that time represented a customer base in excess of one million people. Thereafter I made a further move into the world of consultancy, entrepreneurial activity and independent business. During this developmental process many gears had to be shifted in my brain and personality, which initially hindered and later freed me to make the break. It is these mental gear-shifts that you will need to understand so that you may consciously choose to function intrapreneurially (running a business within a business) or entrepreneurially (going it alone).

      Changing the first gear consists of understanding, not only the fundamentals of the psychological contract that we have with our employer, but more importantly, the psychological contract that we have with ourselves. A psychological contract is not written on paper and formally agreed to between an employer and an employee. Rather it is a set of expectations of ourselves, of others and of the context within which we function. It is this contract that defines our potential for growth and success within a given environment. So subtle is this contract in its intricacies, however, that we often do not know that we are bound by any such thing. Neither are we able to make tangible and lucid the varied components of the contract. It is within this web of ignorance, surrounding the basic mechanisms that drive the human mind, that we remain trapped.

      Although a highly complex subject, psychological contracts can, for the purpose of this study, be defined as either old or new in nature. In paradigm terms, the old contract revolves around having power over while the new contract is based on inspiring a willingness.

      The old psychological contract is familiar to most of us. A story I like to tell serves to describe this contract. When we were young, let us say pre-school, our mother or significant elder often took us shopping to the local store. One day, in walking across the tar we fell and scraped our knee. As far as we were concerned, the pain was intense and we screamed in anger, confusion and pain. What was our mother’s reaction? Firstly, she would investigate the wound and see that it was only a surface scrape. As such, what would her reaction be? Perhaps something along the lines of: ‘Darling, stop making such a racket. You won’t die. It is only a scratch!’

      What is the not-so-subtle message given to us by our caretaker? Simply put, the message is that we are not feeling the pain. We are requested to trust the adult as knowing better. This only serves to confuse our senses and, as such, dilute our trust of self and skew our perception of reality. Unfortunately this lesson is repeated innumerable times, reinforcing the original message.

      Consider a child who has a natural ability with figures. Given her first set of sums in grade school, she somehow manages to get to the right answer, without employing the methodology prescribed by the teacher. Inevitably, the teacher’s reaction would be something along the lines of:

      ‘No! No! I am not interested in the answer, now go back and do it the way I told you to.’ The consequence, of course, is that the child rapidly loses faith in her intuitive intelligence, instead adopting the enforced frame of reference.

      This unfortunate conditioning can be taken one step further. At high school, college and university there has, until recently, been minimal scope (unless one encountered a gifted teacher) for individuality and self-sufficiency. As such, spoon feeding, regurgitation and memory- reliant teaching has been the order of the day. What, in essence, is the inherent corner-stone of the psychological contract being formed with incidences such as these? The contract is one of not trusting oneself and believing that others must know better. This then manifests in later life when some of us, without question, seek employment in large organisations, expecting regular salaries and perceiving ourselves to have gained security. We, by choice, initiate our career lifespan in organisations with expectations of entitlement to a salary, a pension, a medical aid, and a group life assurance.

      Furthermore, we have grand expectations of scaling the career ladder. Our fundamental assumption is that, if we are good employees and listen to our managers (who will tell us what to do and who know better than we do), we will progress up the career ladder by hard work, and be rewarded with status and the all-important trappings of success: larger office, company car, fat salary. We expect some semblance of autocratic management to be exercised upon us by those who know better. We are sometimes not even sure if we prefer the ‘paternal’ autocrat or the ‘non- paternal’ autocrat. (Personally I prefer the non-paternal autocrat, at least I know where I stand with this autocrat, rather than dealing with a wolf in sheep’s clothing.) Moreover, we buy into the task-focused approach and do our level best to keep our personal lives as private as possible. The fact that it is virtually impossible to leave our hearts and worries at home, and that pre-occupation with living issues affects our ability to perform at optimal potential, is beside the point. We learn to abide by the corporate tribal belief system (vested in the old psychological contract), only too well.

      When we recall the behaviours of the old psychological contract

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