Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/is_entrepreneurship_a_manageme.html

by dwynings • 17 years ago

19 20 17 years ago

blogs.hbr.org

The mere title (but the article as well) begs the question, to what extent is management a science at all? While there's a lot of pseudo-science in pop business nonfiction, there's very little rigor - see a summary of this critique here: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/12/...

In particular, "In a paper currently under review, the three argue that not only are business gurus bad at identifying the causes of success, they have no way of telling true greatness from mere luck - if enough people are flipping coins, someone is likely to string together an impressive run of heads. According to their analysis of 13 of the most influential business success books, three quarters of the purportedly great companies had track records that could just as easily have been explained by the vicissitudes of random chance - performances that looked impressive on first glance were simply akin to being the lucky person in a stadium full of coin-flippers."

Maybe HBR is more rigorous than the pop business press as a whole, but this article doesn't seem to be.

davidw3• 17 years ago

If it has 'science' in its title, it probably isn't.

tjic2• 17 years ago

As much as I think poorly of much of the "soft science", there's no reason that there can't be such a thing as management science.

I think that we in the news.yc culture all agree that the following is a good approach to take to assertions and thesis floated about how to run a company, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Elements of scientific method

    * 3.1 Characterizations
    * 3.2 Hypothesis development
    * 3.3 Predictions from the hypothesis
    * 3.4 Experiments
    * 3.5 Evaluation and improvement
    * 3.6 Confirmation

hallmark• 17 years ago

"Computer science"? "Rocket science"?

tjic2• 17 years ago

> The mere title (but the article as well) begs the question

I don't think that that phrase means what you think it means

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

camccann2• 17 years ago

I don't know, that was a more valid use than most. The question "Is X in category Y?" implicitly assumes, among other things, that X exists and that Y is a valid category.

If the validity of category Y is not established, then to argue whether something is or is not in Y is not too far from begging the question of Y's validity.

jbarciauskas2• 17 years ago

It wouldn't be the Internet if someone didn't bring this up. As far as absuses of the phrase go, I say that this is a fine instance of "assuming of the premise", as opposed to the common misuse, which is as a synonym for "raises the question". One article regarding the phrase states, "One of the most common fallacies of assumption is called begging the question. Here the arguer assumes what he should be proving." The arguer here assumes that there is a science to management in his argument that entrepreneurship is potentially an application of management science. However, I contend that the arguer's assumption is misplaced and first the arguer should be proving that the scientific method is applicable to management in the first place.

You can argue that I am misapplying the phrase, but I certainly understand what it means and used it based on the above understanding. Furthermore, I don't think my attempt at communication failed: I am fairly certain you and every other reader of my comment understood the point I was making, which is ultimately the goal of the written word, no?

wrencis• 17 years ago

I will take the other side. Running an entrepreneurship club, I have found that the biggest challenge was deciding who we were. Were we startups? Mom-n-Pop small businesses? Work-from-homers? The key to your question starts with asking, "what do you define entrepreneurship?" Once you answer that, the original question will likely answer itself.

yannis• 17 years ago

My most recent startup created a marketplace for customers to buy and sell virtual goods for their 3D avatar

The author in a way has answered his own question, when he wrote the above. Entrepreneurship - the way understood by the rest of the world is developing the skills to make a profit out of a business. Entrepreneurship the way understood by most us here at HN is developing the skills to create and sustain 'start-up' that will make f*ck money!

You can use Science as part of your product development and management of the Company but Entrepreneurship itself is not Science.

skmurphy3• 17 years ago

"I often saw the best practices of general management fail startups."

Even a quick reading Peter Drucker offers a lot of wisdom for managing a startup.

"The Effective Executive" and "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" have a lot to say about managing time, priorities, and posteriorities (what you are NOT going to do or organized abandonment) that are highly relevant to getting a startup off the ground and growing.

For a shorter piece that talks about value creation and the need to focus outside of the corporation to create value, his "The Next Information Revolution" (published in ASAP but available here http://www.versaggi.net/ecommerce/articles/drucker-inforevol... ) is worth a quick read.

eries2• 17 years ago

That's a fair point. I did not mean to imply that Drucker's work has no relevance for startups. For one, I've been profoundly influenced by his writing.

Rather, I'm trying to work towards a new theory of entrepreneurship that can help us figure out _which_ practices from general management are transferable and which fail. Most MBA's and general managers that I've seen enter startups seem to assume either "all of them" or "none of them." Both answers are incorrect.

skmurphy3• 17 years ago

I think the use of "management science" in the title is problematic as management science is normally defined operations research or industrial engineering. Many of the techniques that you espouse, such as A/B testing, are examples of "management science."

I think what you are taking aim at that's "non-transferrable general management" is the bureaucracy of large organizations. Part of it goes back to the "startup dollhouse fantasy" which is a term you coined that I really like. But I think what you are ridiculing with it is the imposition of formal control structures on teams that are small enough that social process and peer pressure is an adequate substitute.

In "Corporation Man" Anthony Jay talks about 'hunting groups' or 'ten groups' having different rules from 'the camp' or the full tribe. Startups are like hunting groups, but every corporation has many "hunting groups." If you take a manager of a hunting group and put them in charge of a startup they will be right at home. General managers run the camp or the tribe and are less suitable for the special needs of the hunt.

wslh• 17 years ago

Yes, sure, just we don't have enough information to see the "continuum" instead of the discrete parts.

Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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