Defining Your Own Future
By Nicola Tyler, an EO South Africa-Johannesburg member and CEO of Business Results Group.
I’ve been in business for 15 years, and operated as an independent consultant for two years prior to that. I’ve not known a day in nearly two decades when I’ve woken up and known where my next dollar would come from. You can be up one day, and down the next. It keeps me on my toes, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Much of my work involves facilitating strategic conversations with large and medium-sized organizations; entrepreneurship frequently comes up as a theme. “We need to be more entrepreneurial!” executives exclaim. “People are not business-focused; we need more entrepreneurs in this business.”
I often challenge this view by saying that entrepreneurs are often not what corporations need— it’s what the world needs. Real entrepreneurs leave corporations to start their own businesses. An entrepreneur constrained by business policies and processes is a bit like caging a tiger— eventually you have to let it back into the wild.