Entrepreneurial Leadership (Praeger; $37) offers two models that Mastrangelo sees as a “practical compass.” The Opportunity Model focuses on identifying ways to generate new business, while the Enduring Leadership Model emphasizes gaining the cooperation of colleagues and employees.

“The book is really an extension of my teaching,” Mastrangelo says. “A book is something lasting, something with long-term impact. It doesn’t go away after class.”

Mastrangelo had no savings and zero formal leadership training when he bought Adirondack Beverage Co. in 1980. It wasn’t until years later that he went back to school, first through Harvard’s Owner/President Management Program while he was running Adirondack and then for a doctorate at the University at Albany after he sold the business.

There he found numerous definitions of the term “leadership,” but few discussions of the fundamentals of leadership or entrepreneurialism. Why, Mastrangelo wondered, couldn’t they be addressed the way that finance and other business basics were?

He has devoted much of the past two decades to that task, and he thinks the message contained in his book is especially timely now. “We hear so much about entrepreneurs and start-ups,” Mastrangelo says. “We’re always looking for the silver bullet. If there is an answer to our economy, it’s entrepreneurial leadership.”

A good leader is like a good conductor or football coach, he says. That person doesn’t do everything, but it’s not nothing, either. The coach recruits the players, develops the plays, starts practice on time. Without that person, he says, things would fall apart. “Really successful teams have good leaders,” Mastrangelo says, “but they have good players, too. You cannot play their positions for them.”

He says he hates the term “follower” and prefers the term “co-operator.” Mastrangelo says good leaders want their teams to pull them back from the edge of a cliff, not follow them into the abyss.

Mastrangelo considers the entrepreneurial process a creative process. He continues to refine his model based on his practice and research. His goal is to develop models that are simple enough to be remembered and understood, even (or especially) by non-experts. “Everything in life is relationships,” he says. “Entrepreneurial leadership is a selfless practice, not a selfish one.”

Most people are satisfied with “good enough,” Mastrangelo says, but what companies need to succeed is a “wow factor.” People can name 10 or perhaps 20 companies that make them say, “Wow,” even though there are millions of companies producing billions of products. Mastrangelo argues that it’s not hard to get a “wow” through customer service; without that “wow,” your company isn’t going anywhere.

The era when people got one job and held onto it for life is over, he says, and our current environment has a powerful effect on people. “When you have companies moving out, when you have companies laying off thousands of people, there’s a yearning to be your own boss,” he says.

Only 10 percent of people have the stomach to do it, though, he adds. Entrepreneurship requires you to embrace ambiguity and working in the abstract. You have to love problem solving, too. Not everyone is cut out for startups, he says, but everybody can learn to be entrepreneurial, even within larger companies and in nonprofits.

He mentions Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca and Elon Musk as examples of people who did entrepreneurial work at the head of large companies. Control is the key. “If you have control,” Mastrangelo says, “you can be an entrepreneurial leader. It doesn’t matter where you are.”

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Learn more about Angelo Mastrangelo and his approach to leadership at http://www.profmastrangelo.com.

Q: What gave you your start in entrepreneurship?

A: I have been a rebel all my life, and the reason is that I have found fault with the system all my life. I had to learn how to deal with the system because I couldn’t fight it. The answer was to learn how to be entrepreneurial — a creative problem-solver. I was entrepreneurial long before I became an entrepreneur.

My problem was finding an organization that would allow me to do this and not restrict me. I had one boss who did this, but once he left, my career was in jeopardy. The answer was to buy my own business. This doesn’t have to be the answer, though. It would be better if more organizations learned how to give their people freedom and maintain some control.

The best thing about entrepreneurship is the ability to create commerce or new solutions. That’s being entrepreneurial. As for being an entrepreneur, anyone can do it. It is especially easy if you inherit the business or money to buy it. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are not very entrepreneurial.

But being entrepreneurial is not enough, nor is creating an organization that thrives on allowing people to be entrepreneurial. Effective personal leadership is also essential. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs are not the answer. They are just the latest silver bullet.

Q: Why do you see personal leadership as so vital?

A: The underlying cause of many problems we face in our society is the Big Bad Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy’s weakness is that it focuses on professional leadership with little attention given to personal leadership.

In my experience, bureaucracy exists in companies and organizations of all sizes. It exists where it is next to impossible to get to the decision-makers. It exists where rules and layers of management confine people.

Q: Can you give an example?

A: Years ago, I worked for a large company. What I found most surprising was how many rules there were — and how everyone knew how to break them. In fact, your boss would tell you how to break them. For example, I had to make an unexpected trip, and I needed some cash. I needed $150, but the rule was that to get more than $100 you had to submit a request to headquarters and wait about a week to get it. My boss told me to make out two requests for $75, and they gave me the money on the spot.

The rules were more important than doing the right thing. Actually, it was difficult to know what the right thing was. There was no discussion about mission and vision, customers or employee welfare, just rules. This method of operating has destroyed a lot of once-successful companies.

When I returned to school as a graduate student, I was amazed at how much the university and that company had in common. That’s when I realized that the problem was bureaucracy and not business, government or the size of an organization.

Q: How can these issues of bureaucracy be overcome?

A: The real solution lies in freedom with reasonable control. Give people the freedom to create but do not allow them to take advantage of the system, a system that has to have some moral structure. And this is the difficult part of good leadership: allowing freedom but maintaining overall control.

I have always said that I could never control our people at Adirondack Beverages, regardless of how hard I tried or which methods I employed. My partner used to say, “No one has enough money to watch their people all the time.” I would add that I don’t want to, nor do I have the time to do so.

Q: If people really can’t be controlled, how can a leader maintain order?

A: The key is buy-in. The way to get it is a win-win philosophy with a moral basis. The people win — financially and otherwise — when the organization wins and operates ethically and morally. What we did was focus on the right thing to do — our mission, vision, ethics, morals and our budget in time and money — and we gave our people a lot of leeway in the process. That’s the opposite of what so many large organizations do.

Business writer Tom Peters calls this “hard and soft” leadership. It’s hard on the organization’s values and soft on the process. The large organizations are soft on the values and hard on the process, which is what led to the recent disaster on Wall Street.

What we have right now in the United States, both in politics and in the corporate world, is a focus on doing things right with short-term goals and not on doing the right thing. All of this leads to a sort of reverse anarchy. We have a society in which the leaders are out of control and out of touch, and not the people. Effective personal leadership is the missing link.