Build a Successful Business: The Entrepreneurship Collection (10 Items)

Introduction

‘‘I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” That is how George Washington Plunkitt, a member of New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, summarized his lucrative career of “honest graft.” Plunkitt was a scoundrel and a crook, and yet his pithy statement provides us with a good working definition of an entrepreneur: a person who identifies an opportunity and pursues it. A century later, William Bygrave, a scholar and practitioner of the entrepreneurial arts, extended this definition, describing an entrepreneur as someone who not only perceives an opportunity but also “creates an organization to pursue it.”¹

That last part of Bygrave’s definition is essential. Opportunities as we generally understand them are most effectively ...