The Academic Entrepreneur: A Biographical Sketch of Ian C. MacMillan's Contributions to Establishing the Field of Entrepreneurship

• Author: Rita Gunther McGrath
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1185

Research Pioneers

THE ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEUR: A BIOGRAPHICAL

SKETCH OF IAN C. MACMILLAN’S CONTRIBUTIONS

TO ESTABLISHING THE FIELD OF

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

RITA GUNTHER MCGRATH*

Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, New York, U.S.A.

Ian C. MacMillan, originally from Africa, is a seminal figure in forging the contours of the

present-day field of entrepreneurship. He was the first to empirically explore topics such as

venture capital decision making; entrepreneurial networks; cultural influences on entrepre-

neurial behavior; and many issues in corporate venturing. Through the creation of vibrant,

global, scholarly networks, the founding of the Journal of Business Venturing,his dedication to

training and mentoring the next generation of scholars, and establishing the first large-scale

systematic global data collection in the field, Mac has made an irreplaceable contribution to

the well-established field that entrepreneurship has become. He and his students have been

acknowledged as having made significant breakthroughs in our understanding of entrepre-

neurial phenomena, recognized by a burgeoning number of awardsand testaments to scholarly

recognition. He argues that the challenge for future researchers will be to tackle big, messy

problems that do not lend themselves to the popular methodologies employed by academia

today. Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society.

HOW FAR CAN YOU GET FROM THE

IVORY TOWER?

Consider 1975. Gerald Ford was the president of the

United States and Margaret Thatcher had just

become prime minister in the United Kingdom. The

Vietnam war ended, badly, for the Americans.

Within the next two years, Jimmy Carter would

become president, his one-term tenure in office

widely regarded as a period of ‘malaise,’ during

which the Iranian hostage crisis, persistent energy

shortages, the rise of OPEC, and stagflation con-

vinced many that America’s glory days were behind

it. The year 1975 is also notable because that is when

Ian C. MacMillan first came to the United States,

where he joined Northwestern as a visiting professor.

Out of Africa (really, I mean it)

MacMillan, ‘Mac’ to most of us, has an unlikely

biography for a chaired professor at an American Ivy

League business school. Anative of South Africa, his

higher education commenced with a bachelor’s in

chemical engineering. His family moved around the

bush to follow his father’s career of starting up

mines. Since the dominant white language in the

South African bush is Afrikaans, he naturally mas-

tered that, and he spent so much time on mines that

he was able to speak Fanakalo, the Zulu-based

lingua franca of Southern Africa. He would observe

ruefully that he had achieved competency at two of

the most useless of languages from the point of view

of management education. At one point, his family

Keywords: entrepreneurship; Ian C. MacMillan; institutional-

ization; Journal of Business Venturing; Snider Entrepreneurial

Center; entrepreneurial networks

*Correspondence to: Rita Gunther McGrath, Columbia Busi-

ness School, Columbia University, Fourth Floor, Armstrong

Hall, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025, U.S.A. E-mail:

Rdm20@columbia.edu

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Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 9: 188–204 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.1185

Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society

and that of his wife, Jean, ended up living next door

to each other. This happened after they had being

going together for years, but he likes to joke that he

literally married ‘the girl next door.’

University education was followed by work at the

South African Atomic Energy Board, where he

worked on a project to produce uranium hexafluoride

(he came eventually to regard SouthAfrica’s nuclear

ambitions as a hubris-fueled project of grandiose

proportions that flagrantly wasted societal

resources). He then moved to the industrial chemical

industry, working with dangerous products like

nitroglycerine, oleum, lead azide, and supersaturated

nitric acid. As he notes, ‘these are not the conditions

under which you want to encourage workforce

experimentation!’ He then joined a Danish firm

refining edible oils, where he signed up for a part-

time MBA course, the launching pad for his aca-

demic career.

Academia: better than lethal chemicals

At the time, South Africa was a divided, isolated,

difficult society. South Africa in 1975 maintained

apartheid, leaving it a politically isolated county

with little in the way of opportunity for ambitious

young people. With two young children (Sandy and

Eric) of elementary school age to think about, Mac

and Jean began to consider what kind of environment

they wanted for their family. A university degree in

the rising field of business offered career mobility,

and Mac began taking part-time courses at the Uni-

versity of South Africa, where he studied strategy

and operations research. He started teaching there in

1970 and within a few years was awarded an MBA

(1972) and a DBA (1975). His thesis, rather grandly

entitled Aspects of manipulative and accommodative

behaviour by graduate middle managers was basi-

cally a study of how middle managers in organiza-

tions could and did use political mechanisms to

manipulate strategy toward their own ends. He

remains a charismatic and popular teacher with a

blunt but charming style.

During this time, Mac also began his entrepre-

neurial career, joining a young uncle of his who

created a company called TFC International, a

wholesale tour and travel company. They immersed

themselves in building the business, a travel busi-

ness aimed at the adventure segment. This segment,

to Mac, had two defining characteristics. First,

clients had more money than sense. Second, they

had a desire to pay well to enjoy the adrenaline

rush of possibly doing themselves grievous bodily

harm. They organized things like white water

rafting tours on African rivers (as Mac would point

out, a much better value than American rivers, as

there are more ways to die on African rivers for the

same price!). That business (which understandably

suffered from mild attrition . . .) eventually

branched out to include the more staid (but equally

profitable) business segment catering to ‘little

old ladies’ who wanted to go on exotic tours in

their later years. Both businesses provided abject

lessons in the realities and practicalities of

entrepreneurship.

A 1975 visit by professors Larry Cummings,

Andrew Van de Ven, and Ralph Westfal to the Uni-

versity of South Africa proved pivotal. They were

taken by the young professor’s imagination, quick

mind and fresh thinking and invited him to spend

some time visiting the United States. He was offered

a visiting professor position at Northwestern, where

he made a splash teaching courses in strategy and

entrepreneurship, picking up on the overload from

Chuck Hofer’s popular entrepreneurship course. His

colleague Raffi Amit would later say he was a

‘legend’ at Northwestern and that the two (who are

today colleagues at Wharton) first discovered their

mutual interests over the course of several bottles of

‘very good French wine.’ His classroom perfor-

mance brought him to the attention of Columbia

Business School’s Kirby Warren and William

Newman, who engineered a permanent, tenure-track

offer from the school. Mac, Jean, and their family

decamped to New York.

MacMillan moments often include red wine

From Sue Birley: ‘My first meeting with Mac

was, indeed, memorable. It was 1983 (I think) and

I was at my first ‘Babson’ inAtlanta. We went for

a drink in a rotating bar at the top of the hotel and

that was my first encounter with his love of red

wine. Getting to the airport and flying back to

South Bend the next day was a challenge . . . I

remember warning my doctoral students that if

they went off with him for a glass of red wine to

beware. I well remember one who did not believe

me and found himself the next morning in the

same clothes, swaying in front of the audience as

he did his presentation. Neither Mac nor I dared

clap in case he fell over! I won’t name him. He is

mature and ‘senior’ now!’

Research Pioneers 189

Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society Strat. Entrepreneurship J.,9: 188–204 (2015)

DOI: 10.1002/sej