Human-centered management is essential to entrepreneurship

By Professor Bae-Zong Tae (KAIST)

Delivering dreams and passions to employees

Enhancing employees’ sense of ownership, helps produce the best quality products

Value created should be properly distributed

It has become common sense that entrepreneurship is essential for companies to overcome difficulties and to pursue sustainable growth. The key for a successful business leader’s entrepreneurship is to foresee future challenges and find out new consumers’ needs based on empathy. Many business success cases in the Silicon Valley indicate the importance of an entrepreneurial, human-centered management style, and leader-oriented entrepreneurship.

However, as time passes, it is not easy to maintain the spirit of entrepreneurship and passion from the initial starting point of a business. To elaborate, the ownership of a firm’s management can be easily passed down to successors; however, the spirit of the entrepreneurship is not easy. As a start-up grows and expands into a large-sized business, a diversified unit demands new entrepreneurship that is different from its conventional meaning. What are the differencess.

To begin with, the traditional meaning of entrepreneurship has emphasized discovering new business opportunities and realizing them. Also human factors have been mainly centered on the start-up business teams and entrepreneurs. The role of entrepreneurs is important, it is equally imporant for a company on the mature stage to expand its entrepreneurship by incorporating all the members of an organization. For this, managers should not just direct and lead their employees, but also foster a sense of ownership and change the business culture and styles that can cultivate new business ideas by active participation from members. In other words, a call for the humane entrepreneurship is needed in order to shift from the company-centered entrepreneurship.

 Second, the classical concept of entrepreneurship has emphasized value creation, which includes creating economic, social, and individual value.  However, the whole cycle of entrepreneurship is achieved when the outcomes are distributed in a fair and appropriate manner. This facilitates all the stakeholders’ motivation and satisfaction levels, stimulates a sound business culture, and develops society overall.

Third, a call for motivation, capability reinforcement, and vision sharing is required. New dreams and passions should be shared with employees. Also, through empowerment, a sound work environment should be formed. New business ideas should be discussed freely and possibly lead to experimentation. Sharing the business objectives by delivering the best products and service is needed. When all these meet, human-centered entrepreneurship can be set. 

Finally, human-centered entrepreneurship helps to facilitate an organization’s creativity. Firms that are agile provide an environment that fosters creativity. To foster innovation, making association of unrelated or less-related components, asking questions that goes against of traditional concepts, developing new technologies, training, or habits that reduce uncertainty risk are needed.

Now entrepreneurship should be implemented in both start-ups and firms that have been operating for a long time. Also entrepreneurship should accommodate both management-centered and human-centered views. Indeed, an organization that strenuously emphasizes this concept of entrepreneurship and when all members actively pursue this spirit, sustainable growth and development will be achieved.