How can the Golden Circle of Simon Sinek help young entrepreneurs and their teams to co-create their identity? Case study.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” (Stanford, 2005, p.1). These words were spoken by Steve Jobs, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his generation, at a Stanford graduation in 2005, in front of hundreds of young graduates. He reminds us of the importance of self-knowledge and self-listening in order to be fulfilled and to become our natural best. This purpose is an integral part of our identity. Knowing this identity, however, can be a huge challenge. In an entrepreneurial context, building a project's identity is a similar challenge. It can indeed be difficult to build a real identity for a team, a project, or an entire venture. Indeed, it is not always clear and must sometimes be the subject of a reflection, or even a creation. In this thesis, as an avenue of exploration, the literature review will highlight relevant observations by entrepreneurship scholars and several authors put us on the trail of narrative practices. Among these, we will be particularly interested in the concept of the Golden Circle developed by the American-British author Simon Sinek. This author has developed a methodology based on narrative practices and more specifically on sharing stories to create individual and collective identities. It is these shared stories that highlight the intuitions, the courage and the inner voices of entrepreneurs. This leads to the research-question of the thesis: "How can the Golden Circle of Simon Sinek help young entrepreneurs and their teams to co-create their identity?". To answer it, this thesis adopts an exploratory approach mixed with an action research. Indeed, after confirming the potential benefits of narrative practices to co-construct the identity of young entrepreneurs and their teams, the workshops developed by Simon Sinek to discover the Golden Circle were conducted with three entrepreneurial teams. These workshops allowed the creation of relevant data to provide the research question with elements of answer. We will see that narrative practices are a serious approach to helping entrepreneurs in identity construction. Several observations will allow the formulation of opportunities and boundaries that the Golden Circle provide in the framework of identity co-construction.