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Seeing matters through your counterpart's eyes is key to successful collaboration with outside stakeholders. Four strategies companies can use to make this an organization-wide skill.

The idea of the garage entrepreneur--who starts businesses in garages (or basements or dorm rooms or kitchens)--is a highly popular contemporary legend, but not quite accurate. Academic research now claims that entrepreneurs are often organizational products: They typically acquire confidence, business knowledge, and social connections via prior experience at existing organizations. These psychological and social resources aid entrepreneurs in forming companies. Although the belief of the garage entrepreneur contributes to the preservation of the American ideals of opportunity and upward social mobility, it offers misleading insights to would-be entrepreneurs because it suggests an undersocialized view of the entrepreneurial process. Individuals, companies, policy makers, and business schools will benefit from recasting the garage as a contemporary legend and focusing instead on the lessons that can be derived from an understanding of entrepreneurs as organizational products.