Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset is the first step toward creating a more resilient, agile, adaptive, innovative, customer-centric, and human organization.

Leaders who pursue these goals seek to implement approaches such as Agile, DevOps, or flexible teams. Very often, these attempts fail because people are not processes and resiliency, agility, and efficiency are not new programming codes for people. They are behaviours, attitudes, and ways of thinking that can only work when you change the deep systems of values and basic assumptions within an organization.

The first step is to create awareness about your own management approach and corporate culture to which it is inspired.

Leaders must balance different and conflicting expectations while also ensuring that the organization is adding value to its stakeholders. Experience suggests that leaders who are aware of different management approaches and can draw on the most suitable for their situation are likely to add more value than others with a single perspective.

Usually, companies adopt a combination of the four main management models suggested by Quinn (2015): rational goal, internal process, human relations, and open systems.

Organizations adopting (even unconsciously) a rational goal model (‘do things fast’) focus mainly on maximizing output through direction, clarity of goals, and productivity achievement; those adopting an internal process model (‘do things right’) focus on consolidation and continuity, through documentation, information, stability, and control; organisations implementing a human relationship model (‘do things together’) focus on developing people through commitment, morale, participation, and openness; finally, the open systems model (‘do things first’) focuses on expansion and change, through innovation, adaptation, growth, and acquisition of resources.

Companies often do not know the management approaches they are adopting; however, each of them suggests value in different strategies, sometimes in opposite directions, and is linked to a specific set of organizational cultural values.

For example, within any organization, some functions could need to work in a stable and predictable way, adopting unconsciously the value of the internal process model, while others use ideas from the open systems model to leverage innovation.

However, leaders tend to be trapped in their own style and organizational cultural values; they tend to employ similar strategies in very different situations. Experience suggests that one of the most important skill a leader can possess is self-awareness in order to understand themselves and the context in which they are operating. Being aware of the management approaches we are adopting and the possible alternatives is a fundamental to enhance the potential of the organization.

In recent years, to be more resilient, agile, adaptive, innovative, and customer-centric, organizations have tended to move beyond rational goal and internal process models to the human relationship and open systems models to foster creativity, breakout thinking, competence, collaboration, commitment, and courage. The core idea is to cultivate and unleash the untapped human potential.

The first step is to start cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset at all levels of organisation that is based on seven core principles (Hamel & Zanini, 2020): increasing the sense of ownership, embedding marketplace principles, fostering meritocracy, empowering a performance-oriented community, adopting open innovation, encouraging experimentation and risk taking, embracing paradox between exploiting and exploring. They are the characteristics of what we call an H-Organization.

Start-ups are perfect examples. They turn employees into entrepreneurs while creating zero distance between employees and users and making the company a power node in an ever-expanding web-centric ecosystem.

The entrepreneurial mindset of start-ups should be adopted also by large organizations to encourage breakout thinking and rebellious thoughts, lateral thinking and collective intelligence, resiliency and agility, adaptivity and emergent strategies, collaboration, transparency and trust, cross learning and personal growth, continuous experimentation, and innovation.

It is time for a human revolution, and cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset within the organization is the first step in activating change.