Permission to hustle: Igniting entrepreneurship in an organization

Perceived institutional barriers, especially in existing organizations, often impede entrepreneurial action in the face of crisis and uncertainty. Understanding how collective entrepreneurial action occurs despite deeply institutionalized mindsets is important to advance entrepreneurship theory. We report on an autoethnographic account of an entrepreneurship professor and several colleagues who gave themselves permission to hustle to overcome perceived institutional barriers to entrepreneurial action. As the findings reveal, a permission to hustle mindset provided a platform for the group of professors to act entrepreneurially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a matter of several days, the group acted under uncertainty to create a new “idea blitz” program which attracted over 150 participants from around the world. We argue that permission to hustle is an important sense-breaking device that ignites and sustains entrepreneurial action by breaking taken-for-granted assumptions about institutionalized practices and redirecting attention toward urgent and creative action, especially in existing organizations where institutional barriers are perceived to impede such action.