Linked Stars Blog

Authors: Manu and Kanwal Rekhi

What is the difference between a manager and an entrepreneur?  Is one better for society than the other? These are questions that frequently arise during our mentoring sessions with young college graduates who are at the beginning of their professional careers.

Management, as a scientific discipline, and managers as practitioners of it, are concerned with the control and maximization of a firm’s resources. These resources may include capital assets, human resource assets, customer assets, and processes. Managers thrive in and prefer relatively predictable and stable environments which enable them to steadily and incrementally improve utilization, nurture talent, cut costs, eliminate waste, and shorten development cycle times to extract more profits from same assets. That said, the ability for a manager to effect change in an organization is constrained by the inertia of his assets.  A five percent annual improvement in productivity at a large industrial…