That’s how long it took China to accomplish what the West did in two centuries.

The Conference Board Review^® Article

By Larry Farrell

Larry Farrell is the founder of The Farrell Co., a worldwide organization that researches and teaches entrepreneurial practices. His most recent books are Getting Entrepreneurial! and The Entrepreneurial Age. He can be reached via www.TheSpiritOfEnterprise.com

My first visit to China was back in 1981, when everyone was still wearing their Mao caps and the omnipresent blue or gray suit. The Ministry of Technology Transfer had invited me to speak on the latest American management concepts. At the end of the lecture, a frail Chinese man approached me at the podium. In very broken English, he managed to say that I was the first American he had seen since World War II. He thanked me for coming to China to share my "management wisdom." I asked him what his job was. "Manager of the rolling steel mill outside of Beijing." Then I asked this small, aging Communist how many employees he managed. "Sixty-five thousand." I gulped and asked if he had any questions about management. He nodded. On a slip of paper, he had written the word entrepreneur. "I want this. Can you teach me to be this?"

I've never forgotten that question. It was one I couldn't answer at the time. That simple-sounding question, from such a simple man, from such a "backward" place, completely baffled me. As a management consultant, I had never even thought about entrepreneurship and certainly had never studied it at Harvard Business School. Two years later, I started my own business to research and teach entrepreneurship. So in a sense, I've spent the last twenty-five years trying to get the answer.

My most recent trip to China was just two months ago. In a land of 1.3 billion smart and enterprising people, what a difference one generation has made! The country is literally in the throes of an entrepreneurial revolution.

Aiding and abetting this revolution is an academic phenomenon that I haven't seen in any country in the world. There are hundreds of activist, entrepreneurial scholars at leading universities across China, who seem to be giving the revolution a very special momentum, especially with young people. Of course, it helps that university professors are more highly respected in China than in any Western country. But even so, it's quite unique to see academics in any country actually leading the charge toward creating a more entrepreneurial national economy.

Zheng Li is typical of this new entrepreneurial force. He teaches at the prestigious Business School of Nankai University in Tianjin and is the director of entrepreneurial research at Jilin University in Changchun. (He's also my business partner in China.) "Entrepreneurship is the hottest subject in all China today," he explains. As if to underscore the point, he reminds me that there are currently four to five million start-ups a year in China, with no end in sight.

I had a wonderful three-hour speaking session with some two hundred entrepreneurship students at Nankai. I spoke using an interpreter, but about 80 percent of the students spoke excellent English, and their questions were as inspired and incisive as any B-school group I've ever addressed anywhere. For example, one student asked: "My parents say it is safer to work for a big Chinese company, so how do I convince them that being an entrepreneur is the right thing for me?" I explained that the number-one reason that Americans become entrepreneurs today is because of repeated downsizing and outsourcing of good jobs in big companies. And just that morning, Zhang Yuli, the B-school's deputy dean and director of its highly regarded Research Center of Entrepreneurial Management, told me that 60 percent of all new Chinese entrepreneurs were fired from their last company. So the biggest risk of all in both the United States and China seems to be working for a big company.

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