
Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? - dwynings
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/is_entrepreneurship_a_manageme.html
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jbarciauskas
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/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/12/luck_inc/)

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.

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tjic
> 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>

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camccann
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.

~~~
skmurphy
Entrepreneurship is not a synonym for management science. Asking if it is
equivalent or a member of the set of "management sciences" does not "beg the
question."

If by "the validity of category Y is not established" you mean that the
validity of management science is not established I think you are ignoring a
body of work dating to the 1940's in applying mathematics to decision making.

Disciplines like industrial engineering or operations research are normally
considered members of the set of management science. They substitute decision
making based on models and simulation for naive methods based on intuition and
rules of thumb. Examples would include inventory control theory, queueing
theory, game theory, decision analysis,...

See for example <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_science> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research>

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skmurphy
"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...](http://www.versaggi.net/ecommerce/articles/drucker-
inforevolt.htm) ) is worth a quick read.

~~~
eries
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.

~~~
skmurphy
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.

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yannis
_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.

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

