Extracts from an article written by Robert Kiyosaki for Amazon.com as one of its 1st ever Hall of Fame inductees.

In 1983, the Harvard Business School published a paper entitled ‘A Perspective on Entrepreneurship’ written by Professor Howard H. Stevenson, that defined the differences between entrepreneurs and employees. It is one of the most articulate articles on this particular subject that I have read. While many differences were examined, I found two in particular to be especially insightful.

The first difference between entrepreneurs and employees is:

A person with an employee mindset might say, “I would start my own business but I don’t have the money.” Or “I’d love to invest in that piece of real estate, but I don’t have the down payment.” In both of these examples the person focuses on their resources, in this case their lack of money, rather than the opportunity.

In a similar situation, a person with an entrepreneur’s mindset might say, “Let’s start the business and we can finance the business from the cash flow.” Or “Tie up the property and we’ll find the money later.”

The second difference between entrepreneurs and employees is:

This means that employee-type leaders would rather hire people and bring their talent “in-house.” Rather than have an outside firm do their creative work, an employee-type leader would prefer to hire the talent and have them under their control. While there are economic reasons for doing this, the report stated that the primary reason is control. This is because employees gravitate to a leadership style that is more suited to a military command-and-control type of organization.

There are key, fundamental differences between the mindset of an employee and the mindset of an entrepreneur. One of the great things about this world of webs is that the world is now open for business to billions of people who choose to think as entrepreneurs – rather than employees.

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