The Entrepreneurial Culture

Book excerpt: Does Your Culture Empower Your People to Think Like Others? If any business is to thrive in the global marketplace, its employees must be engaged and empowered. In other words, they must think like owners. Problem is, few employees know how. Your job as a leader is to train them to think this way. Because entrepreneurial thinking is a natural extension of company culture, you may need to re-build yours from the ground up. Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey New York Times bestselling authors and founders of Barefoot, America s #1 wine brand know how to create the conditions that draw out and nourish people's inner entrepreneurs. Here, they take the principles that empowered their own tribe of productive, creative, loyal employees to beat the odds and boil those principles down into quick, easy lessons you can put into practice right away. You ll discover: How to find and hire people with entrepreneurial DNA (P. 5) How to drive results with performance-based compensation (P. 13) How to foster innovation by getting out of your people s way (P. 17) How to remove roadblocks to the entrepreneurial spirit (P. 33) Why everyone at your company must ask questions (including you) (P. 35) Why your people should embrace mistakes (P. 39) The Entrepreneurial Culture perfectly complements the lessons from the authors New York Times bestseller "The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America s #1 Wine Brand." Together, these books will give your company the edge it needs to thrive and boost the bottom line. Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey started the Barefoot Wine brand in their laundry room in 1986, made it a nationwide bestseller, and successfully sold the brand to E&J Gallo in 2005. Starting with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles and create new markets. Today, they are sought-after entrepreneurial thought leaders, consultants, keynote speakers, and workplace culture experts with hundreds of articles in national and professional publications. In The Entrepreneurial Culture, Houlihan and Harvey take everything they know about the spirit of entrepreneurship and teach C-Suite leaders how to infuse it into their company cultures to engage and empower their employees.