Monday, September 19, 2016
Champagne or embalming included in the venture
DARNELL SMITH – ENTREPRENEURSHIP – 2016
This short book is practical and
pragmatic. It is trying to identify the specificities of entrepreneurs,
focusing on startup entrepreneurs. The author does not negate the fact that
there can be entrepreneurs in big companies and in institutionalized entities,
but he is really concerned by those who work on their own.
He is clear about them not being
freelance workers. These are just satisfying a pre-existing demand from the
market in some stand-alone initiative. They do not create a company and he says
they do not take risks, and particularly financial risks, meaning they do not
invest that much. We could and should discuss that point. He does not contrast
entrepreneurs and self-employed people. But he would say that they do not
create anything since they just practice a trade that exists with a high level
of demand for it on the market but once again on a stand-alone initiative. This
time though there may be a high level of investment and many of these are like
artisans of some sort, the difference being an artisan can hire someone to work
for him or her whereas a self-employed person cannot hire anyone apart from
himself or herself.
If we understand entrepreneur
with that meaning, someone who starts a startup business with borrowed money on
an idea that is not yet satisfied on the market, hence inventing a product or a
service that is new and risky since it has not been in existence and
experimentation before, or if it had it was a failure. The risks are important:
financial, personal and even economic including for the employees the
entrepreneur will hire. Note, and that has to be clearly said, this word is
originally French. It does not have a feminine form (it would be slightly
politically incorrect). And it does not have at all the meaning it has in
French. The word has been borrowed, translated into a new meaning. The most
common meaning in French is “entrepreneur de pompes funèbres,” which means
mortician.
The book is characterized by a
style and I think the author is not aware of it. It uses innumerable ternary
structures and patterns. It is quite obvious the author wants to avoid the
binary simple thinking of everyday life and ordinary people for whom everything
is either-or, or neither-nor. Systematically, but not all the time, the
structures and patterns are ternary like some kind of syllogism.
But of course the content is
essential. I am going to insist on a few elements.
The first one is that this
entrepreneur’s responsibility and project require a lot of imagination, a
vision as the author calls it, that has to be all-powerful, almighty. The
vision has to do with something new and the desire to implement it in order to
change the world, change people, and make a profit, though the profit is not
the main motivation, supposedly. The vision is. The author is obviously
speaking of startups that produce objects that can be sold on the market. He
does not consider services so much. If he had considered education for example
he would have easily seen how narrowly controlled it is in institutionalized
education but he would also have seen that a startup in education is just as
much controlled as the institutionalized service because to start an
educational business you have to get permits, you have to submit to inspections
and all kinds of administrative injunctions and censorship, even if you are
working with adults. As for that the Church
of Scientology has tried education all
over the world and in every country they have been obliged to conform to some
norms and procedures that often neutralized their project, not to mention how
they have been sued in some countries, particularly in France .
Imagination and vision are
beautiful but they are hunted down by anything bureaucratic and administrative.
In many cases startups can only exist, in some countries, as exceptions and in
some zones where they are literally ghettoized. I understand it may be
different in the US .
But startups are not an American only phenomenon. But it is true that Amazon or
Ali Baba would never have been able to develop from a European country, any
European country. They were startups originally, like Google or even Microsoft
and Apple.
Why is it so? For the fact that a
startup entrepreneur is submitted to four lines of stress as the author says,
four lines of stress that are rejected by most people in European countries
dreaming of a workless society (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/world-without-work-utopia-hell-human-labour-obsolete).
And he lines up 1- demanding, requiring
sustained effort and the deployment of resources; 2- his or her lack of skills
and abilities to perform various tasks; 3- constant changes in the products and
services; 4- balancing work and private life. This stress comes from the effort
but also the fact the resources are borrowed, often on a short term basis and
some returns are expected fast. It comes from the necessity to hire people to
perform what he or she cannot do by himself or herself and then he/she has to
be responsible for these people since he/she becomes an employer. When you deal
with avant-garde products and the services attached to these products change is
the norm and often no one knows ahead of time what direction that change will
go. Think of the successive versions of Windows, or of the iPad. And think of
the stress created by the demand from the customers that their old machines or
software could be updated or upgraded to the new machine or software, which is
not the interest of the industrialist who wants to sell every year new machines
and software to the same people, as if they were a captive audience. For such
entrepreneurs private life is becoming evanescent, episodic, like some wasted
periods in the constant flow of necessities and inspiration.
At this point I would like to say
the book would be a lot more interesting if the author had given some real
cases to illustrate what it says, to put some flesh on the bones.
And these four forms of stress lead
to four constant and heavy obligations. You have to solve all problems by
yourself. You have to learn new things every day or look for some help from the
unknown outside world. You have to change your product or your service day
after day: it is never finished if you want to satisfy the client's demands
that are anyway unpredictable. And finally you have to cultivate special times
like vacation periods, escape capers, as if it were some pepper in the soup of
enslaving startup entrepreneurship. Here I would say an entrepreneur has to be
super open to the public when dealing with the market and in his private life
he has to be extremely easygoing and open to the partners and the needs they
have and don’t always express. I seem to think in a way this accumulation of
stresses and obligations might develop some autistic dimension in startup
entrepreneurs (or use such a dimension pre-existing in the entrepreneur), what
the Buddhist call onepointedness, one objective, one perspective, one trail to
both blaze and follow.
The worst stress is that an
entrepreneur has to have a very strict planning and yet be open to
opportunities and imagination. How can he or she be? It is asking water to burn
or fire to be cold. Feedback is important. How can he/she integrate it in a
strict plan? And in spite of all the author has one moment of binary thinking
when he reduces the intellectual stance of entrepreneurs to being both
convergent (bring many things together) and divergent (imagine many things from
one starting point). He is trapped by the words convergent-divergent that do not
have a third element. Convergence is what some call induction, the imagination
of one outcome from the consideration of an array or elements, a strong
feeling, a conviction that this is the outcome of the multiple situation
considered at one time. Only the future can prove the entrepreneur is right or
wrong with his/her own succeeding or failing. Divergence is more a deduction
than anything else. From a situation A we deduct it should produce a result B.
We can demonstrate the truth of the deduction, though the real proof comes from
practice, and yet Einstein was right long before it could be proved right in
the cosmos.
But there is a third solution the
author does not consider because he considers entrepreneurs, people who want to
control the future, their future. The Buddhists have a concept that brings up
this third stance that I call subduction. The accumulation of knowledge, of
facts, of problems, of data in general enables something to emerge from this
Brownian soup without anyone controlling it. Big data brings up the idea that
we can predict the future by a set of probabilities. This outcome will be true
for 85% of reality, but it will also be false for 15% of the same reality. Big
data is the way machines think but how can we explain that the minority choice
here and there wins and dominates. How can we explain obvious populist
candidates or options in some elections win when big data tells us populist
ideas are always defeated, in the long run. An entrepreneur could follow a fad
or some popular trend, but how can he be successful in the long run if he only
follows fads and popular trends?
If an entrepreneur is to be “self-confident,
optimistic, full of hope,” in two words “confident and resilient” as the author
says, it is a cocktail that seems to be rather rare in real life. Is it enough
to “learn to trust your instincts”? Certainly not, because it is NOT instinct
but visionary illumination, or, in Buddhist terms, “samsara,” that is to say the
existential consciousness of the subductive genesis of emerging possibilities.
Hence “to jump in the deep end” is not enough. You have to jump into it from
the top diving board at least ten meters over the water or even from the top of
a cliff into the ocean 25 or 30
meters lower. You must have the wanderlust gene (http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/wanderlust-gene-people-born-travel/953464/)
somewhere.
You may then satisfy the five
requirements proposed by the author: “1- Things become subject to evaluation; 2-
Decisions seem less scary; 3- Problems become less intimidating [and you become
open to] Creative problem solving; 4- People become more important; 5- Ideas
cease to be fleeting.” And you will experience vertigo in front of this abyss
of requirements and possible achievements. Have a good trip across the
wasteland of Mars, alone like the Martian of some fame. There is a fair share
of “luck” necessary in that adventure, and particularly the luck of not meeting
with some tigers, those “tygers, tygers burning bright” William Blake liked so
much.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:56 AM 
