Corporate Entrepreneurship: Top Managers and New Business Creation

Corporate Entrepreneurship is full of interesting people and interesting stories. But it is not a “popular” book of “miracle workers” and “originals.” It is a book of ordinary executives doing the right thing but also making plenty of mistakes, fighting over risky and difficult decisions – and, above all, working very, very hard. It is based on more than twenty years of in-depth research and on Vijay Sathe’s even longer career as a top-flight consultant to major businesses all over the world. The book shows what to do and what not to do; what the opportunities are and what the pitfalls are. It is a book both to enjoy and to study – but above all to apply its lessons to one’s own enterprise. This book examines how top managers – corporate executives, division general managers and the division’s top management team members – influence new business creation in a corporate division. It is written for the aspiring manager, the practitioner, and the scholar. The book takes the reader into the realworld of top managers to explore a relatively uncharted territory in a systematic and comprehensive way. The business realities, the management culture, the corporate philosophy, the organizational politics, the personalities, and the personal priorities of the people at the top are vividly portrayed in these pages. It is not so much that the devil is in the details; it is that the details are the message, which is delivered herein by the top managers in their own unvarnished words.