Aspiring entrepreneurs can find mentorship in a new book by SFI Trustee John Chisholm. Unleash Your Inner Company: Use Passion and Perseverance to Build Your Ideal Business (Greenleaf Group Book Press, October 2015) lays out a stepwise process for starting a business and achieving results, from concept through development.
Chisholm draws insights from his three decades of experience as an entrepreneur, CEO, and investor. He focuses on the mutually-reinforcing relationship of passion and perseverance while reflecting on how founding, cofounding, growing, and selling companies, such as his Decisive Technology (now part of Google) and CustomerSat (now part of Confirmit), can help those who want to start and grow a business.
Chisholm presented the book to the SFI community last week at a special signing event in New York at the home of SFI Trustee Gerry Ohrstrom.
"SFI has hugely influenced the book and more generally, informs entrepreneurship," Chisholm said during his remarks at the event.
The book mentions many SFI scholars, he said, including Brian Arthur, Melanie Mitchell, Scott Page, Eric Beinhocker, and Ricardo Hausmann. It also considers several ideas from complexity: that the economy is adaptive, that startups shape and transform the economy, that an entrepreneur's passion and perseverance reinforce each other in a positive feedback loop, that a startup's business strategies co-evolve with the economic and resource environment, that the ideas startups are based on are combinatoric, and more.
"This illustrates how widely applicable SFI insights are to every field of human endeavor, even entrepreneurship," he said. "There are fresh perspectives in every chapter of the book, and much of that is due to SFI."
More about Unleash Your Inner Company
Read a review of Chisholm's book
Read Chisholm’s presentation at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship (January, 2014)