Introduction

Of all the known species and entities in the universe, humans have been the most proactive at bucking the system. Humans are curious, restless and perceive that they are supposed to grow, actualize and branch-out. Consequently, civilizations that advanced have learned how to systematically change their condition and interrelationship with their surroundings to achieve progressive outcomes. Progressive humans don’t just fall into a routine and wait for most things happen naturally like other living entities; rather they invent, adapt and change with reason. Furthermore, humans have the intellect to recognize universal laws of nature and principles of human life that can facilitate mechanical advantage or special forms of leverage, and then to individually and collectively apply them to change material, social and metaphysical conditions for the better. Humans at the cutting edge tend to experiment, and ultimately learn how to more strategically manage our advance of reality through space and time. The most relevant and salient efforts to achieve progress relate to the collective pursuit of economic vitality and sustainability.

Mankind’s material progress clearly evolves the patterns and rhythms of existence. We sleep and work in new cycles, associated with the new material, status and wealth provided. We similarly nourish ourselves and run-down in ever-evolving cycles, as well as love and hate in ever-changing cycles. In our organizations, we as managers initiate patterned solutions that may seem so brilliant in a given time, only to invariably become patterned problems in another time. The need for progress in life’s material and psychic interrelationships has, thus, become the central basis of human motivation. The leading organizations and societies evolve the producing and consuming cycles in new, progressive and systematic ways that vividly become virile and sustainable, and soon are deemed “good,” the benchmark against which others are compared, at least fot the time being. Human societies are, and always have been, to a large extent, as successful, happy and satisfied as what’s produced and consumed at any given time. Even monks need a better monastery and the counter culture better arguments; and if they are not convincing, then better guns and war machines. We are thus constantly tweaking the systems of life to make existence more aligned with some vision of sustainability that evokes goodness, prosperity and above all happiness.

Progressing humans pay particular attention to getting economic systems right. The most progressive humans work hard to imagine a future with altered material and psychic states and situations that are essentially more productive. The real leaders don’t accept a stagnant world driven by only naturally occurring events, nor do they become over-committed to historically successful patterns established by previous authorities that may no longer be efficient and effective; rather, progressive entrepreneurs manage the future. Modern, advancing societies mostly learn how to create new and better outcomes by scientifically and systematically studying the complex cause-and-effect forces that co-exist naturally (e.g., their natural resources) or artificially (e.g., developing their technology). Civilized humans intuitively, and iteratively, assume they have certain rights and obligations to learn and progress more, in the name of learning and progress, defined by an infinitely growing spiral. Consequently, there is always this innate drive to overtly try to rewrite the rules and procedures for pursuing collective and organized life, as we proactively in manipulate our socio-economic happiness and quality of life.

Innate forces this strong must either be a blessing or a curse, or both; but that debate is for later. Right now it is more fruitful to explore just what we are talking about when we use the term, entrepreneurship. The finer debates in later chapters about the never-ending process of entrepreneurship hinge on how we define and perceive the socio-economic concepts and interrelations associated with "entrepreneurship."

Dave Freedman (2005) posits that organized systems naturally produce “frontals” as part of growth. Frontals are smaller self-constructed patterns (spun-off / branches) that spread the organization. Trees have branches that are like smaller trees, cities have suburbs that resemble the city, organizations form division like the parent and so forth. This automatic process of mutation, stabilization and extension is natural and automatic in healthy, growing life.

The word entrepreneurship has taken on various meanings through history. Hoselitz (1951) traces the history of the word from its earliest usage in Latin. He points out that the meaning changed as social developments in material have changed, and managers have faced new kinds of requirements for imagination, change and leadership. He emphasizes that the definition of entrepreneurship has wormed its way through an ill-documented and multi-disciplinary history; yet, its management essence and style has consistently placed entrepreneurship at the cutting edge of economic thought and social action. Hoselitz implies that entrepreneurship is a unique style of managing change and progress that seems to have innate qualities, and has been around forever. Thus, in all times, entrepreneurial managers are particularly distinctive. In ancient times, entrepreneurs were the hero, the general, the priest, the king, the lord and others in charge of governing and establishing goals and rules. The progressive managers from antiquity, the renaissance and the industrial revolution were explorers (like Columbus), early traders and other missionaries; then came the individual revolutionaries and the innovative visionaries who became the early capitalists, robber barons and the great inventors; and today, the most progressive and great entrepreneurs are led by cyber-entrepreneurs. All great entrepreneurs stand-out in their particular generation.

Entrepreneurship is distinctive not so much because it is more logical, rational or good; rather because it is so fresh and vital. Imagine you are shopping for bread and are confronted with loaves of the same kind of bread that have been baked on different days. Do you think the fresher ones stand out on some very identifiable and significant dimensions? Do you think you could pick the freshest on a regular basis or in a blind-test? The entrepreneurial setting, which is guided by the entrepreneur, is especially fresh and exudes openness, fluidness, changeability through time and space. Entrepreneurs create unique systems intentionally so that people will notice. They constitute an intentioned management catalyst for change, and make conditions ripe for it. Can you imagine all this?

A constant orientation towards change manifests identifiable behavioral qualities in entrepreneurial managers. But, how do we clearly define these key distinguishing dimensions? Language is a real problem in distinguishing managerial phenomena like entrepreneurship, because the connotation, annotation and perceived meaning for entrepreneurship are clearly entangled in time and situation. How do you define management, which is ahead of its time, and changes again when its time has come? This little twist certainly adds to the depth of abstraction inherent in defining and understanding entrepreneurship as a management style, orientation or tactic, at any level. Yet, this little twist is so important to understanding the essence of entrepreneurship. For instance, we certainly observe quite different configurations of entrepreneurial behaviors in the capitalistic economies of the 17th and 18th centuries than we do today; or entrepreneurship in a communistic system like China’s or Cuba’s contrasts quite a bit with America’s. Furthermore, entrepreneurship was quite different in the feudal systems than it was during antiquity. Each civilization, nation and group of people through time has defined, accepted and nurtured its entrepreneurs, in its own special way. In modern America, an entrepreneur’s experience in the real estate industry or in farming might be quite different from a Dotcom entrepreneur on many important dimensions; and we have found that the nature and quality of entrepreneurship takes on different qualities through a, so-call entrepreneurial manager’s career and an organization’s life cycles evolution.

The theory and knowledge that has arisen from centuries of study and documentation is therefore somewhat irregular. It is therefore tenuous to generalize too much across times and systems; and the future is just as vague. I further suspect that the abstraction deepens with the knowledge that emerges at the point of progress (e.g., different kinds of knowledge and skills constituted what was important for start-up success in the early industrial revolution, the age of industrial expansion, and the different generations of the computer age in the global economy of today). Deep abstraction makes entrepreneurship especially difficult to rigorously and scientifically delineate at any point in history. The net result is a field of entrepreneurship that often seems to lack principled theory and practice. But things are not going to be easier, because there is no doubt that mankind’s economic/political system possibilities will continue to constantly expand and accelerate.

Further definitional contamination arises from the fact that nations, cultures and social organizations have different worldviews about sustaining themselves. It’s more than just differences in language I’m talking about; it’s differences in the way they look at life and the legitimate ways of living it. Thoughts, behaviors and events are observed, perceived, documented and eventually ruled through highly stereotypical eyes. There are thus ideological agendas that often establish political bigotry, which endeavors to project its own version of history, regardless of the consequences. Consequently, it is difficult to integrate all the historical philosophy, rhetoric, debate and dialogue into a cohesive body of rational and logical knowledge about a singular concept known as entrepreneurship.

To effectively sort through all this abstraction, subjectivity and contradiction, serious students of entrepreneurship need to become “system thinkers” who “try” to rationally make the concept integrated. Furthermore, great managers who wish to be entrepreneurial invariably must become "systems thinkers" who are obliged to understand and build ever-better models capable of changing and progressing organized economic and material reality. True systems thinking, in management is about learning at the cutting edge of philosophy, science, opinion and inquiry, especially as it relates to the entrepreneurial style. At its most entrepreneurial, systems thinking is about boldness in seeking out new parameters, variables and interrelationships offer perspective that can be modeled, and which can genuinely provide vision and other bases to lead profitable enterprises. This is quite a challenge to work at the cutting-edge of anything so dynamic, whether it is at the observational, theoretical or practical levels. Thus, one must be entrepreneurial about entrepreneurship to untangle the work of untold theorists and practitioners who have been wrestling with the concept of entrepreneurship for a long time. So, let’s start from the beginning and explore some of the history of the field that I found most relevant. The entrepreneurship literature is rich with inspiration and imagery about the way entrepreneurial systems work and how to envision the basic character of entrepreneurship.