What can entrepreneurs learn from the past? | Big Think

What can entrepreneurs learn from the past?

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Build something that is tied to who you are.

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Nancy Koehn:

Nancy Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn's research focuses on how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact.

Her new book, Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times is an enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—including those in government, business, education, and the arts—Forged in Crisis spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson.

Koehn is the author of numerous books, articles, and Harvard Business School cases. She writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review Online. She is also a weekly commentator on National Public Radio and has appeared on many national television programs. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in many other venues.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Koehn earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before taking her MA and PhD in History from Harvard. She lives outside Boston and is a dedicated equestrian.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What can entrepreneurs learn from the past?

Nancy Koehn: One is that you can build something to last. I mean we live in a society with an extraordinarily short and shortening attention spans and sense of time. And the people that I've studied not just in this book, but over now two decades, are people that really built institutions and products and developed people for the long run. So thinking in a longer time span than how long it takes our iPod to sort of boot up is, I think, a worthy endeavor. The second lesson is that for almost all of these people, the work, and the business, and the company, and the endeavor was completely tied up with who they were. So the idea of finding an outline in which you can use your passion, and use your gifts, and learn about your weaknesses, and try and move forward, you know, toward light and possibility is just completely imbedded in many, many … most entrepreneurial stories.And then I think finally what you learn as an entrepreneur and I've spent many, many years coaching entrepreneurs in a sort of one-on-one or one-on-three way what you learn as you take those steps along the entrepreneurial path is how much input an individual has. For the first few months, first few years, sometimes longer over an entrepreneurial venture, almost everything hinges on the two or three people that hold the idea and are building the company. They're the mother lode of the computer of this possibility. And so you can see in really pure, stark terms when you look at an entrepreneurial venture really what kind of impact a single person or a very few people can have.