创业导师：创业需要一点妄想

    MAB学生在创业时犯过的最常见的错误是什么？

    我们在课堂上的主要工作是教导学生找到一个创意，把它转变成商业模式，然后再把它分解，找出评估这个创意的方式。但许多创业者并没有这么做，而是仓促上阵。

    也有许多年轻的创业者希望等到自己的创意臻于完美之后再公之于众。有的创业者因为过于倔强，就算全世界都否定他，他依然坚持推动自己的想法，结果遭遇失败。还有创业者不停变换创意，有的则根本没有辞去自己的日常工作，因为他们对自己的想法缺乏信心。所以，学生必须在倔强和缺乏决心之间找到一个平衡点。

    您认为您的创业教学可以达到哪种程度？

    研究创业的人从来没有停止过对这个问题的争论但如果我认为创业是一件无法教授的事情，我就不会从事现在的工作了。我们当然可以让人们在创业方面做得更好。

    许多人对创业者存在误解，而事实上他们只是有着不同个性的人。所以认为创业者都是贪婪的风险爱好者的观点，是完全错误的。许多最伟大的创业者都非常擅长转移风险。

    您是否认为有些创业技能是无法通过教学传授的？

    沃尔特•艾萨克森的史蒂夫•乔布斯传记中谈到了乔布斯的现实扭曲力场。这种概念出现在上世纪八十年代的《星际迷航》（Star Trek）。所谓现实扭曲力场意味着乔布斯拥有超凡的魅惑力和人格魅力，他在谈自己的想法时，他的听众会为他所倾倒。他们会被他的观点迷住，希望追随他，帮助他取得成功。他最初的麦金塔（Macintosh）团队每周工作90到100个小时，而且持续了数年时间。

    在我们最出色的学生创业者中，也有人具备这种现实扭曲力场，但我不知道这是否是我能够教授的东西。我能做的是向学生展示它，记录它，为学生指出来。

    What are the most common mistakes that MBAs make when launching startups?

    A lot of what we do in the classroom is teaching students to take an idea, turn it into a business model, break it into pieces, and figure out how to evaluate it. But an awful lot of entrepreneurs don't do that, and they rush into their vision.

    There are also a lot of young entrepreneurs who don't want to expose their idea until it's perfect. Or they fail because they're too headstrong, and they keep pushing the idea when the whole world is saying no. Other students flip around too fast from idea to idea, and some never quite quit their day job because they don't have any confidence in their idea. So there's a zone between being headstrong and lacking resolve that students have to live in.

    To what extent do you think you can teach entrepreneurship?

    People who study entrepreneurship debate this endlessly, but I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't think it could be taught. We can definitely make people better at it.

    There are a lot of misconceptions about entrepreneurs, when really they're just people with a lot of very different personalities. And so the notion that an entrepreneur is an avid risk seeker is not true at all. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs are great at shifting risk to other people.

    Do you think there are any entrepreneurial skills that you can't teach?

    The Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs talks about Jobs creating a reality distortion field. That idea has been around since the 80s from Star Trek. It means that Jobs was so mesmerizing and charismatic when he talked about his ideas that anyone he spoke to would just fall under his spell. They would become so captivated by the idea that they would want to follow him and would want to help him succeed. His original Macintosh teams put in 90 to 100 hours per week for the span of a couple of years.

    Some of our finest student entrepreneurs have that reality distortion field going, but I don't know if I can teach that. I can really just show it, put a camera on it, and point it out to students.