Being an entrepreneur isn’t about chasing dollars, business consultant Gifford Pinchot says.

It’s about turning a dream into action.

Pinchot sees the entrepreneurial spirit, properly directed, not as an enemy of the environment or of altruism, but rather, as the best ally of those values.

And properly nurturing and directing entrepreneurial energy is the objective of Pinchot’s new Bainbridge Graduate Institute, a not-for-profit spinoff from his consulting business.

The outfit held an invitation-only open house over the weekend.

“Our focus is on sustainability – the survival of organizations in harmonious relationships with the limited natural resources of the planet,” Pinchot says.

The campus is a large classroom in a small office complex on Madrona Way that is something of a center for liberal thought – housing Yes Magazine and PeaceTrees Vietnam, in addition to BGI.

But it will be adequate, Pinchot says, to bring in 20 students at a time for intermittent classes during the two-year program that will lead to a master’s degree in sustainable business administration.

“Students will come occasionally for a week at a time, and the rest will be distance learning,” Pinchot said. “This will be action learning. We want them doing things.”

Bainbridge Island is well-suited for professional training, Pinchot said, because of a factor that some people criticize.

“We’re blessed by Bainbridge Island’s cell-phone silence,” he said, referring to the widespread difficulty with wireless reception here. “It’s a surprisingly large help.”

The Pinchot family has long been associated with conservation causes. His grandfather is considered the founder of the U.S. Forest Service, and the national forest surrounding Mt. Rainier was named for him.

“I sat on Harry Truman’s lap when he signed that bill,” Pinchot said.

He got into business consulting through an unlikely route.

Undergraduate work in economics at Harvard was followed by graduate work in neurophysiology at Johns Hopkins, which led to, of all things, dairy farming then blacksmithing.

A later stint working on developing new products gave him a perch for observing the creative process, which in turn led to his 1985 book “Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur.”

“Intrapreneuring,” a term Pinchot coined, envisioned creating what were essentially small businesses within larger organizations as a way to overcome the array of rules that stifle creativity.

One immediate thrust of the BGI is to bring those ideas to government through the Center for Innovation in Government, which officially opened last week.

“The basic problem in government is that there are no external standards of performance,” he said. “Success becomes having a big budget.”

Civil creativity

The Center for Innovation has three goals, Pinchot said – turning civil servants into entrepreneurs, turning groups with ideas into high-performance teams and turning concepts into business plans.

The Forest Service has been receptive to some of Pinchot’s ideas, and has created a number of “enterprises” to offer specialized services like timber-value assessments, trail development and literature searches.

Those teams bid on specific jobs, frequently against outside firms. If they get the job, they are not paid in hard dollars, but bookkeeping entries do transfer funds from the buying agency’s budget to the in-house “enterprise.”

“It works because of commitment and choice,” Pinchot said. “The teams have the freedom to make good things happen, which makes their lives thrilling.

“The choice – they choose who to work for and those who need the work done choose them – causes the customers to treat them with respect.”

He adds: “Choices cause constructive systems to persist and non-constructive ones to wither away, so the system becomes self-organizing.”

Another effort now under way will be a project on the Caribbean island of Dominica, headed by Institute president Sherman Severin, a Dominica native.

“It had a banana economy that provided them with a very nice life until the World Trade Organization outlawed the government subsidies,” Pinchot said. “We’re working on some alternatives that will provide value-added alternative employment.

“Eco-tourism is one possibility. Dominica is largely unspoiled because it’s very mountainous and has no beaches.”

Publication of “Intrapreneuring” led to a busy, Connecticut-based consulting practice for Pinchot and his wife Elizabeth.

Their 1995 move to Bainbridge Island was driven by the unlikely combination of Lyme Disease and Pegasus Coffee House.

“I’m an avid outdoorsman, and I got tired of worrying about Lyme Disease in the East,” said Pinchot.

“We came to Bainbridge for a visit, went to Pegasus for coffee, fell in love with the place and before we knew it, we’d bought a house.”

Two more books followed the move, and the Pinchot’s thought it was time to slow down and go into at least semi-retirement.

“But when you write something and someone comes along and says they really want to implement it,” he said, “you want to go help.”