Studying entrepreneurship – a comforting illusion of progress? Guest blog by Richard Lennox, scale-up executive who has held leadership roles at Skyscanner and Current Health

As business professor and author Dr Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead, “Studying leadership is way easier than leading”.  It’s somewhat ironic that I start this piece with a quote from one of the endless supply of resources available to teach us how we should build, scale and lead a company. As a voracious reader and learner, I deeply appreciate that, when used appropriately, the acquired knowledge of the experience of others allows us to make better decisions and scale faster. This quote, however, has been getting under my skin recently.

It highlights a hard truth about our start-up and scale-up ecosystem. The ease of studying entrepreneurial success contrasts sharply with the challenges of actual execution. While the numerous learning experiences for “how to start a startup” and “how to scale” might seem inherently valuable to founders, we have to ask ourselves: Is our desire to act as educators a comforting illusion of progress rather than a catalyst for real achievement?

I do not dispute that there is a clear need to close the entrepreneurship knowledge gap left by the more traditional educational establishments in Scotland. Yet, as we are inundated with workshops, meet-ups, courses, and accelerators – how many inspire action that materially changes the trajectory of the business? Do we really know?

Building and scaling a business demands resilience, adaptability, and primarily the courage to act in the face of often overwhelming uncertainty. It is messy and unpredictable. We make decisions with incomplete information, pivot strategies to reflect market feedback, and endure significant setbacks, all of which are specific to our context. You cannot truly replicate that experience in a classroom, even those created by the deified of Silicon Valley. In my own experience of driving growth in two of Scotland’s most successful tech sector companies, success was driven by a pattern of matching problems to solutions in the critical moments and synthesising that expertise into action and delivery.

While education is valuable, it needs to better complement necessary action to unlock growth. Effective leaders will strike a balance between acquiring targeted knowledge and critically applying it. Fundamentally, both Skyscanner and Current Health were successfully built on an execution first mindset coupled with continuous learning. So, how can we better support and move towards a bias for action within our ecosystem?

One specific suggestion is maximising access to experienced operators, executives, and founders – those that have lived the journey – at the point and time of need. This goes beyond mentoring programs with prescribed approaches towards delivering direct support through experienced people with skin in the game. 

We need to better help scale-up leadership teams to discard the notion of boards and advisor panels made up of institutionalised investors; and to create cross-functional ‘mastermind groups’ that contribute at the right time. These mastermind groups would regularly support and advise but also lean into the business as needed, taking the time to go deeper into challenges presented. 

Engagements with this group are highly execution focused and accelerative for the business, while at the same time helping the leadership teams grow and learn. When you move from the start-up phase towards having product-market fit and the scaling phase of the business, this option would be inherently more valuable than the latest, best selling “How to scale” lessons.