5 Entrepreneurial Dimensions

Autonomy

Autonomy is the ability for employees to control their work situation. Depending on your company and
industry, employee autonomy might involve a choice in the selection of projects, roles or clients. Google
for example, similarly to 3M, used to have a famous 20% rule wherein all creative employees were
allowed to spend 20% of their time on projects that they thought were most beneficial to Google. Gmail
and AdSense are supposedly outcomes of this autonomy. As the company grew however, it seems that
the rule became too difficult to mange and slowly fell out of favor. Some employees jokingly say that the
20% rule is actually the 120% rule.

Competitive Aggressiveness

Competitive aggressiveness is the tendency to intensely and directly challenge competitors rather
than trying to avoid them. Aggressive moves can include price-cutting and increasing spending on
marketing, quality, and production capacity. An example of competitive aggressiveness can be found in
Ben & Jerry’s marketing campaigns in the mid-1980s, when Pillsbury’s Häagen-Dazs attempted to limit
distribution of Ben & Jerry’s products. In response, Ben & Jerry’s launched their “What’s the Doughboy
Afraid Of?” advertising campaign to challenge Pillsbury’s actions. This marketing action was coupled with
a series of lawsuits—Ben & Jerry’s was competitively aggressive in both the marketplace and the
courtroom. Although aggressive moves helped Ben & Jerry’s, too much aggressiveness can undermine
an organization’s success.

Innovative

Innovation in its modern meaning is "a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of
device or method". In the first half of 2018, Meituan Dianping—a Chinese tech platform that expedites
the booking and delivery of services such as food, hotel stays, and movie tickets—facilitated $33.8 billion
worth of transactions for more than 350 million people in 2,800 cities. In food delivery alone, it handled
2.77 billion transactions: That’s 178 Meituan-enabled services every second of every day. The average
customer used Meituan 38% more often than the prior year.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Grab, the Singapore-based ride-hailing company, forced Uber out of
the region in 2018 and acquired its local operations. A few months later, it expanded its app to offer its
130 million users not only food delivery and travel booking, but also financial and other services. These
efforts helped Grab hit $1 billion in revenue in 2018 and attract more than $3 billion in fresh funding to
expand. Later this year, it’ll add healthcare services from Ping An, the Chinese digital health giant.

Proactive
Proactive support occurs when you create solutions to your customers’ problems before they ever occur.
This could be a phone call to alert customers about outages, a knowledge base section of your website,
or a frequently asked questions page. One of the examples is Facebook. Rather than rely on support
tickets and in bound calls, Facebook gives customers several way to solve their own problems. The social
media giant provides content on their site that answers frequently asked questions and walks the user
through some of the system’s features. Its dynamic help section provides documentation on various
topics along with site overviews for new users. Through Facebook’s example and success, we can see
that users want to be able to learn as they go and figure things out firsthand.

Risk Taking

Risk taking is the act or fact of doing something that involves danger or risk in order to achieve a goal.
Arianna Huffington, as the founder of one of the first and most commercially successful online news
publications, the Huffington Post, as well as the health and wellness project Thrive, Arianna Huffington
has always been a self-starter. She studied economics at the University of Cambridge, and by 2005 had
penned a number of successful books, starred in a TV show, and built a career as a successful journalist.

When she proposed launching a new media platform, she was discouraged by naysayers even within her
own family, who warned her to be wary of failure. Instead, she put in the hard work to gain investor buy-
in and build the first opinion-based online news outlet of its kind. When it comes to risk-taking, she has
encouraged entrepreneurs to move past their fear of failure, saying, "Failure is not the opposite of
success -- it is the stepping stone to success. For anyone who is an entrepreneur, that is perhaps the
most important lesson.