The Project Book

CHAPTER 16 BE AN INTREPRENEUR

Startup CEO Jeremy Bell told Business Insider magazine, ‘I suppose our failure can be summed up quite easily: an inability to show traction’. Entrepreneur Amit Goel recalled to the same publication, ‘Everything was going good. But we always had one issue. We never had enough money ... and this became the cause of our death. We ran out of money’. Over at Medium, entrepreneur Martin Erlic admitted, ‘It turns out that we underestimated the complexity of the project and overestimated our ability to complete it on a limited budget’.

Sound familiar? Most project managers with a few projects under their belt will recognise one or more of these scenarios. Each, however, is related not by a project manager per se, but by an entrepreneur. Someone who had the guts to stake everything they had on an idea, even if the idea ultimately failed.

What does it teach us? They had the courage to pursue their dream. They invested time and their own money (or funds they could raise from investors who bought their dream). In the end, it didn’t work out so they had to shut it down.

Many people believe that project managers need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Although I recognise the value of this mindset (more on that in a minute), I’m not sure I fully agree with the proposition. After all, they are two very different beasts. Statistically, start-ups have a much higher failure rate than corporate projects. Indeed, according to an article in Fortune magazine as many ...