The iceberg and the sustainable entrepreneurA Practical Guide to Sustainable Entrepreneurshipaf Xenia Duffy & Maria Shubhra Ovesen

The book is a fundamental book in Sustainable Entrepreneurship, which should facilitate the journey from idea to project, to potential company and at the same time guide your personal development towards becoming an entrepreneur. In simple and easily accessible language, we present a range of long-term, practice-oriented models that are relevant to your sustainable entrepreneurial journey.

We want to challenge the image of the entrepreneur as a hero figure with an ingenious idea working 100 hours a week and sleeping on a mattress in the basement until the company is successful, after which it is sold to the highest bidder investor.

We believe that there is a need to challenge the image of who can become an entrepreneur, what it takes to become an entrepreneur and what successful entrepreneurship is and can be.

We would like to call for entrepreneurship to be rethought as an essential personal and professional competence. Entrepreneurship is about getting started. It’s about acting. About learning through experience and about failing in many different ways. It’s about finding your own way. About being able to formulate his own definition of success.

The book is therefore both a guide to entrepreneurship as a competence, and a toolbox that helps you to relate to and actively develop yourself towards a sustainable business that balances all three bottom lines.

Why an iceberg?

There is a lot of focus on the visible in entrepreneurship, what is about the idea itself (the product or service) and what the entrepreneur shows of himself to the outside world. However, it is ours faring that it is all the invisible that is crucial to your success as an entrepreneur: your personal development, your team and everything that lies behind the execution of the idea, which rarely comes to the surface.

Therefore, it is obvious to visualize the book’s narrative with an iceberg, which has also become a popular and easy-to-understand picture of the impact of climate change and thus the burning platform that drives many entrepreneurs’ focus on sustainability.

That is why we have written this book.

First and foremost, we would like to share our experience as consultants in sustainable business models, entrepreneurship educators and entrepreneurship program facilitators. We would like to help you who have an idea you would like to test. You who go with an entrepreneur in the stomach. You who have already started your business but are looking for sparring on how to get on with it.