Comments on: Review of Effectuation

By: Stuart Read

Stuart Read — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 15:43:29 +0000

Hello all – the Bird in Hand principle is intended to describe the effectual principle of starting with your Means. The connection being starting with the Bird you have in your Hand – the means you have immediately available. Crazy Quilt is intended to reflect the collage the multiple partners co-create using the various means at their disposal. The terminology is probably confusing, but more important than the terms are the ideas behind them. If youd like to see a brief video illustrating the principles, I just found a new one up from the Netherlands at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIXVe4nEDEE. Hope this helps!

By: usmita afrose

usmita afrose — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:32:26 +0000

Mr. Erickson
I think there is a confusion(probable mistake by you) between Bird-in-hand principle and Crazy quilt principle. Because In the book of Entrepreneurship written by Robert D. Hisrich, it is written that ‘”The patchwork (crazy) quilt principle is means-drived rather than goal drived. The emphasis is on creating something new with existing means rather than discovering new ways to achieve goals”" and”" The bird-in-hand principle involves negotiating with all stakeholders willing to commit to a project without worrying about the opportunity costs”".
Causal v. effectual is very clearly defind. thanks for these.

By: Bill Erickson

Bill Erickson — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:32:43 +0000

It was more of a mental frame of reference that better describes how an entrepreneur operates.

It made me more confident in what I've been doing. For example, there's a project I'm working on now involving life sciences technology. We wrote a b-plan that's "good enough," and now we've started forming partnerships with companies that will benefit from our technology (and benefit us of course). Instead of paralysis by analysis, we're going around to key companies and showing them our technology. We're basically saying, "We have this great hammer and we're looking for the right nails. How could this help you?"

My formal business education would say we're doing this wrong – that we should do extensive market research and find the market opportunity that has the highest net present value. But seeing similarities in what we're doing and the successful entrepreneurs have done makes me more confident in my intuition.

By: eschipul

eschipul — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:37:07 +0000

Love this type of logic "What can I do with these means?"

It would also be interesting to hear what concrete actions or behaviors you changed as a result of this? Or did it drift back to being a mental frame of reference, but not one that led to immediate changes? Just curious…