What comes to mind when I say, 'entrepreneur'? The Silicon Valley cowboy, leverage mobile platforms and building social networking utilities? The steel tycoon of the industrial revolution, forging a new path to an industrialized America? Or the engineer whose innovative manufacturing methods revolutionize the way cars are built, bringing them within reach of ordinary Americans? Whatever your conception is, the entrepreneur is quite an exciting individual nowadays. Entrepreneurialism is not a career; it is a culture. But that culture, that emergent order of ideas, doesn't all fit within its dictionary definition. The question is this: do we shed a valuable set of ideas in order to conform to the dictionary, or do we reinvent the entrepreneur?
Jean Baptiste Say coined the term, giving us our classical conception of the entrepreneur as an independent businessman, an "intermediatory between capital and labour." According to Say, the entrepreneur managed his workers and his equipment in order to provide goods and services to the market. So far, so good, right?
But if that's all an entrepreneur is, why does Stanford regularly invite economists, rappers, authors, presidential advisors, and presidents of charities to speak at its "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" seminars? If Say's definition was exclusive, how come drug dealers, lawyers, and stock brokers don't burst into mind when we think 'entrepreneur'? Something is missing.
Maybe we need to reenvision what it means to be an entrepreneur.
The overriding theme of entrepreneurial culture today is innovation. The entrepreneur who follows in someone else’s footsteps, with someone else's business plan, selling someone else's idea, isn't. That's great; innovation drives the economy and the world forward. The creative entrepreneur stretches his mind into the future, dragging it into the present's grasp.
Here's another commonality among entrepreneurs: they start small. Large firms spin off huge subsidiary corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars of initial capital. Entrepreneurs focus a relatively small pool of resources onto a single goal with brilliant intensity. What they create is a scalable start-up, that is, one that can be transformed into a mammoth institution down the road. The great capitalists of America, guys like Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerburg , started as entrepreneurs. They became CEOs, presidents, and chairmen. But CEOs, presidents, and chairman don't operate small, scalable start-ups--they aren't entrepreneurs anymore.
The marriage between innovation and starting small is by no means accidental. If an idea is truly innovative, it's probably risky. It's untested. It would be stupid to dedicate relatively large amounts of resources to what may crash and burn. So the start-up is an experiment; if it burns, you cut your losses and try something else. If it thrives, you attract more resources and grow it into something great--an Apple, a Pixar, or a Facebook.
Now that we've narrowed the entrepreneur to a creative innovator, who starts small, and scales up, we find one thing missing: any mention of profit. The entrepreneur is not restricted to the business world. Why should he be? Why should a creative genius be restricted to pleasing stockholders when the world needs innovation in so many more domains? Suddenly, entrepreneurialism as a way of life opens wide: it grows to encompass every meaningful human endeavor.
Intellectual entrepreneurs like Duncan Black began entire schools of thought ( like Black's Public Choice Theory), outside any preexisting academic disciplines. Others, like Alfred Nobel or Richard Wurman, created new institutions for encouraging, advancing, and disseminating new ideas (the Nobel Prize and the TED conference, respectively).
Evangelical entrepreneurs create innovative ways to spread the Gospel and cultivate spiritual growth. My old church was a start-up; they met in a movie theater, answered texted-in questions during service, and published a weekly webcast to address anything they didn't have time to answer on Sunday. Even outside the church doors, it's hard not to find entrepreneurs at every turn whenever people do God's will. The YMCA & YWCA, the boyscouts, and the small-group phenomenon all meet start-up criteria.
Social entrepreneurs are motivated more by altruism than profit. Some finance poor entrepreneurs, and create trade channels for craftsmen. Others, like George Washington Carver, were inventors--Carver designed hundreds of technologies using agricultural products that wouldn't deplete soil as severely as cotton. He only ever applied for three patents.
Different people. Different passions. Different goals. But innovators, all. Entrepreneurs, all.
Having reenvisioned the entrepreneur, maybe we should seriously consider reenvisioning life itself. We could call the new framework "Universal Entrepreneurship." The idea? Simple--make everything a start-up, and treat life like the playing field where one after another, start-ups are built and sent onto their eventual paths. Why think this way? Because there's no good reason why life has to be lived the way we normally live it. Let's stop pretending that everybody needs a linear, one-track career, or that life has to occur in 'stages,' (college, careers one, two, and three, followed by retirement) like the life cycle of an insect.
Kids will ask what they should "be" when they group up. Now there's a new answer we can give them--a universal entrepreneur. "Find the things you love, the things you're meant to do, and do them all. Build charities, start companies, invent technologies, and create platforms for people to share ideas." When they ask how they'll be able to do so much, we can tell them to treat their start-ups like legos: discrete units, separately formed, stacked one on top of another to form the composite structure of life. The art of entrepreneurship is to form the lego; the art of life is too stack them together beautifully.
Maybe it's not for everyone. Of course specialization is a great thing. But maybe there's some kid out there, equally passionate about physics and anthropology as he is about ministry and music, who was made for this sort of life. Maybe telling him or her to bottle up half a dozen genuine passions and interest for the sake of a single career is a really terrible idea. Maybe we've already confined dozens of those individuals into our shoddy expectations, without knowing it.
Now, if you were a kid who wanted to do all things awesome in the world, wouldn't that be the coolest thing ever? Wouldn't that motivate you to learn and grow as a person? The more I think about it, the more I suspect that our poorly thought out, half-baked cultural and economic norms have a lot to do with why some kids don't grow up. Maybe if we gave them better reasons, they would actually grow up with gusto.
Jean Baptiste Say coined the term, giving us our classical conception of the entrepreneur as an independent businessman, an "intermediatory between capital and labour." According to Say, the entrepreneur managed his workers and his equipment in order to provide goods and services to the market. So far, so good, right?
But if that's all an entrepreneur is, why does Stanford regularly invite economists, rappers, authors, presidential advisors, and presidents of charities to speak at its "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" seminars? If Say's definition was exclusive, how come drug dealers, lawyers, and stock brokers don't burst into mind when we think 'entrepreneur'? Something is missing.
Maybe we need to reenvision what it means to be an entrepreneur.
The overriding theme of entrepreneurial culture today is innovation. The entrepreneur who follows in someone else’s footsteps, with someone else's business plan, selling someone else's idea, isn't. That's great; innovation drives the economy and the world forward. The creative entrepreneur stretches his mind into the future, dragging it into the present's grasp.
Here's another commonality among entrepreneurs: they start small. Large firms spin off huge subsidiary corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars of initial capital. Entrepreneurs focus a relatively small pool of resources onto a single goal with brilliant intensity. What they create is a scalable start-up, that is, one that can be transformed into a mammoth institution down the road. The great capitalists of America, guys like Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerburg , started as entrepreneurs. They became CEOs, presidents, and chairmen. But CEOs, presidents, and chairman don't operate small, scalable start-ups--they aren't entrepreneurs anymore.
The marriage between innovation and starting small is by no means accidental. If an idea is truly innovative, it's probably risky. It's untested. It would be stupid to dedicate relatively large amounts of resources to what may crash and burn. So the start-up is an experiment; if it burns, you cut your losses and try something else. If it thrives, you attract more resources and grow it into something great--an Apple, a Pixar, or a Facebook.
Now that we've narrowed the entrepreneur to a creative innovator, who starts small, and scales up, we find one thing missing: any mention of profit. The entrepreneur is not restricted to the business world. Why should he be? Why should a creative genius be restricted to pleasing stockholders when the world needs innovation in so many more domains? Suddenly, entrepreneurialism as a way of life opens wide: it grows to encompass every meaningful human endeavor.
Intellectual entrepreneurs like Duncan Black began entire schools of thought ( like Black's Public Choice Theory), outside any preexisting academic disciplines. Others, like Alfred Nobel or Richard Wurman, created new institutions for encouraging, advancing, and disseminating new ideas (the Nobel Prize and the TED conference, respectively).
Evangelical entrepreneurs create innovative ways to spread the Gospel and cultivate spiritual growth. My old church was a start-up; they met in a movie theater, answered texted-in questions during service, and published a weekly webcast to address anything they didn't have time to answer on Sunday. Even outside the church doors, it's hard not to find entrepreneurs at every turn whenever people do God's will. The YMCA & YWCA, the boyscouts, and the small-group phenomenon all meet start-up criteria.
Social entrepreneurs are motivated more by altruism than profit. Some finance poor entrepreneurs, and create trade channels for craftsmen. Others, like George Washington Carver, were inventors--Carver designed hundreds of technologies using agricultural products that wouldn't deplete soil as severely as cotton. He only ever applied for three patents.
Different people. Different passions. Different goals. But innovators, all. Entrepreneurs, all.
Having reenvisioned the entrepreneur, maybe we should seriously consider reenvisioning life itself. We could call the new framework "Universal Entrepreneurship." The idea? Simple--make everything a start-up, and treat life like the playing field where one after another, start-ups are built and sent onto their eventual paths. Why think this way? Because there's no good reason why life has to be lived the way we normally live it. Let's stop pretending that everybody needs a linear, one-track career, or that life has to occur in 'stages,' (college, careers one, two, and three, followed by retirement) like the life cycle of an insect.
Kids will ask what they should "be" when they group up. Now there's a new answer we can give them--a universal entrepreneur. "Find the things you love, the things you're meant to do, and do them all. Build charities, start companies, invent technologies, and create platforms for people to share ideas." When they ask how they'll be able to do so much, we can tell them to treat their start-ups like legos: discrete units, separately formed, stacked one on top of another to form the composite structure of life. The art of entrepreneurship is to form the lego; the art of life is too stack them together beautifully.
Maybe it's not for everyone. Of course specialization is a great thing. But maybe there's some kid out there, equally passionate about physics and anthropology as he is about ministry and music, who was made for this sort of life. Maybe telling him or her to bottle up half a dozen genuine passions and interest for the sake of a single career is a really terrible idea. Maybe we've already confined dozens of those individuals into our shoddy expectations, without knowing it.
Now, if you were a kid who wanted to do all things awesome in the world, wouldn't that be the coolest thing ever? Wouldn't that motivate you to learn and grow as a person? The more I think about it, the more I suspect that our poorly thought out, half-baked cultural and economic norms have a lot to do with why some kids don't grow up. Maybe if we gave them better reasons, they would actually grow up with gusto.
Brilliant post, you and I need to sit down and talk about a potential paper we could write together which would be incredible.
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