Organizational Behavior

Sixteen

Creating Organizations

When changing an organization is warranted but unlikely, or when an attractive opportunity pulls people away from the current organization, starting a new venture is a possible solution. People who embark on the adventure of starting a new organization usually follow a path that includes four steps: (1) They identify an opportunity, (2) they take initiative, (3) they develop plans for the new venture, and (4) they mobilize resources.

Tom Szaky immigrated at an early age from Budapest, Hungary, to Toronto, Canada. His parents were doctors, but Szaky had a bent toward being an entrepreneur and started his own business, a web-design firm, at the age of 14. Despite earning a five-figure income from the venture, he decided to move south to attend college at Princeton University.

His hope was to turn waste into marketable products.

Szaky had known friends who were exploring the use of “worm poop” as a fertilizer, so he and his friends at Princeton began to experiment with feeding their leftover cafeteria food to worms. The results produced an excellent fertilizer that could be gathered and bottled in recycled soda bottles, no less. That got Szaky thinking ...