Leading and Managing Teams in Entrepreneurial Organizations: an Experiential Perspective

Abstract

This article focuses on summarizing best practices for leading and managing diverse teams in entrepreneurial companies. Our approach is to build on sound academic principles, but we focus on bringing in a strong experiential perspective based on extensive discussions with active venture capital investors in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area innovation ecosystem. A sidebar article summarizes these findings. A key observation is that the most important indicator of success in entrepreneurial ventures can be attributed to lack of leadership and team performance, with business model/market factors less important and technology failures even less of a factor. We highlight best principles for building and leading diverse, inclusive, agile teams appropriate for the biopharma and technology industries.