Has Lead­er­ship Fallen for the En­tre­pren­eur­i­al Hype?

Once a month, researchers at Copenhagen Business School provide Børsen readers with a current and research-based perspective on the challenges facing leaders.

This time professor Christina Lubinski explains, how the entrepreneurial spirit has become part of leadership far beyond the start-up environment. This brings both benefits for leaders and pitfalls they should avoid when transforming that spirit into practice.

Christina Lubinski is professor at the Deparment of Business Humanities & Law at Copenhagen Business School, and part of the project ‘Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society’ at CBS. The project, funded by Carlsbergfondet, explores how entrepreneurialism reshapes business, policy, and society from frontier technologies to everyday work.

Born in scrappy startups, the idea of entrepreneurship has spread far beyond its origins. Today, leadership that isn’t entrepreneurial looks stale and unappetizing, like greens forgotten at the back of the fridge. From Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra ‘move fast and break things’ to Elon Musk’s high-risk moonshots, Silicon Valley has set the global playbook for what entrepreneurial leadership has become. 

We live in an age of entrepreneurialism: a mindset that celebrates agility and disruption as universal virtues. It is no longer just a business practice but a social expectation that recasts leaders of every kind as would-be entrepreneurs. The project ‘Rethinking Entrepreneurship’ at Copenhagen Business School shows how deeply this logic runs. It shapes how the Danish military innovates, how the labour market negotiates fairness, and how Europe debates artificial intelligence. 

Should Nordic leaders simply copy this playbook, or chart a different course? Nordic leadership has long stood for something different: responsibility, trust, and social cohesion. The question is whether that tradition can survive in today’s cult of the entrepreneurial.

Entrepreneurship Fever in Leadership

Entrepreneurial leadership is seductive. It fuels innovation and helps leaders respond quickly to crises, from supply chain breakdowns to digital opportunities. But as the logic spreads, it spins its own mythology. When every domain of society is urged to ‘act like a startup,’ the reference is less to real entrepreneurs and more to the fantasy of a startup: endlessly agile, disruptive, and unencumbered by rules.

This is not an argument against entrepreneurship. Its energy and creativity are essential. But leadership today must also recognise entrepreneurialism’s sleight of hand, its tendency to dress up novelty as transformational progress while obscuring slower, more sustainable paths. 

We see that in the debates over artificial intelligence. In 2024, 28% of Danish companies reported using AI, the highest rate in the EU and more than double the European average. Businesses are racing to test generative AI to scale faster and prove their entrepreneurial edge. But today’s AI excitement is as much about hype as it is about technology. Such hype works like rocket fuel. It inflates valuations, attracts talent, and buys time while real results catch up. As capital floods into AI, hype itself is mobilised as a leadership tool. It allows leaders to project entrepreneurial daring, not through outcomes, but through amplified expectations, set against the grey predictability of established norms and institutions.

Still Hooked on Hype

This isn’t new. Hype has long served as a marker of distinction, elevating the unruly above the conventional. The word ‘hype’ began as slang for early twentieth-century drug addicts using hypodermic needles in the underworld. It later riffed through jazz countercultures, carried by their improvisational energy and rule-bending style, before finding its way into the startup world, where it fuelled an entrepreneurial leadership style that celebrated boundary-pushing misfits, like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

Just as jazz thrived on improvisation against tradition, today’s debates about generative AI carry the same rebellious tune. They advance narratives of deviance (‘we’ll unleash it before regulators can react’), disruption (‘AI will replace the radiologist’), and rule-breaking (‘laws are for laggards; pioneers rewrite the rules’) in a bid to claim leadership of the AI revolution.

The Nordic Edge

So should we prioritise entrepreneurial agility or responsible leadership? That’s a trick question. Casting entrepreneurship as ‘move fast and break things’ and responsibility as ‘play safe and fall behind’ reduces leadership to a caricature. The real lesson of the Nordic model is that we can move fast because we protect the norms that hold society together.

For Danish business, the opportunity is to double down on leadership that anchors bold bets in the trust and cohesion of our society. That is how we guard against excessive entrepreneurialism—change that treats every rule as disposable—which risks corroding trust and turning disruption into ideology. The recent shift in Silicon Valley, where tech elites morph into political power brokers, shows how unchecked entrepreneurial leadership can erode the very foundations it depends on. By contrast, genuine leaders deliver impact while strengthening the social fabric. The harder challenge is whether Nordic leaders can uphold that standard as much of the world moves the other way.

If entrepreneurialism is the spirit of our age, Nordic leadership can be the compass that guides it. It ensures that the future we build is not just fast, but fair; not only entrepreneurial, but economically and socially desirable.

The ‘Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society’ project at Copenhagen Business School, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, explores how entrepreneurialism reshapes business, policy, and society from frontier technologies to everyday work.