Inc. magazine has a great article on what separates entrepreneurs from everyone else, but especially from the MBA-corporate types. This analogy sums up the article quite nicely:

[The study author] likes to compare expert entrepreneurs to Iron Chefs: at their best when presented with an assortment of motley ingredients and challenged to whip up whatever dish expediency and imagination suggest. Corporate leaders, by contrast, decide they are going to make Swedish meatballs. They then proceed to shop, measure, mix, and cook Swedish meatballs in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible

In other words, entrepreneurs just look around and say “ooh… I betcha that if I invent Facebook, it’ll sell well”, whereas corporate types at Google do a lot of market research, then decide that Google Buzz is a good opportunity in a growth-market where they can leverage existing expertise and market share with relatively little risk. And entrepreneurs don’t limit themselves, because they don’t know Facebook is going to be Facebook: it starts out as a college yearbook, and the entrepreneur constantly reacts to what’s going on, and changes strategies accordingly. In other words, there is no plan.

The article calls the two mindsets “effectual” and “causal” reasoning, for the entrepreneur and corporate executive, respectively. The corporate executive likes to gather all the facts, predict the future, lay out a plan, and then carry out that plan to a tee, being fairly confident that it will work. The entrepreneur, on the other hand, hates plans and just goes with an idea, doing whatever seems right at the time.

Corporate managers believe that to the extent they can predict the future, they can control it. Entrepreneurs believe that to the extent they can control the future, they don’t need to predict it.

So being an entrepreneur, like being an Iron Chef, ‘simply’ takes a lot of training and experience so that you can cook delicious things up on the fly, with no recipe. Whereas if you don’t have the confidence and know-how to do that — or the gumption to take the associated risks — you should stick to the safety of the corporate world and its market studies and focus groups.

Via Neatorama