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The Conference Board Review® Article
What’s Left to Say
Our columnist has finally said everything about entrepreneurship — almost.
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.
When my old friend and former business partner Tom Peters heard that I was keen on researching and teaching entrepreneurship, he warned, "You can say everything that needs to be said about entrepreneurship in one paragraph." The implication was clear: Stick with the big-business management stuff he had written about in his best-selling book In Search of Excellence.
Well, twenty-five years (including four delightful years of writing this column) and three books of my own later, I'd have to say that either the great Tom Peters got it wrong or it's taken me a hell of a long time to get that paragraph just right. Of course, who could blame Peters or anyone else for pooh-poohing my newfound interest in entrepreneurs way back in 1983? It was still all about management in those days. Starting a small business was something you did if you couldn't get a "real job" at a Fortune 500 blue-chip outfit like GM or IBM or Citibank.
How shortsighted! People simply hadn't yet recognized that entrepreneurship was the greatest economic-growth tool ever invented and that entrepreneurship, not big business, was to become the real engine of prosperity around the world. Indeed, the business press rarely talked about the entrepreneurial small-business sector and the fact that it was creating 80 to 90 percent of all new jobs. And certainly, back in those days, when Communist leaders were still threatening to bury capitalism, no one predicted that by the twenty-first century, socialist Russia and China would become the entrepreneurial hubs of Europe and Asia.
At this point, a little economic history might put all this in perspective. The nineteenth century gave us the Industrial Age, driven by a relative handful of great entrepreneurial tycoons or, as some called them, robber barons. Entrepreneurship was the exclusive domain of the Levers, Carnegies, and Rockefellers. To control the emerging, sprawling empires of the Industrial Age, the twentieth century produced the Managerial Age. An army of consultants and B-school professors began spreading practices and theories worldwide and, in the process, so downgraded entrepreneurship that it practically became a dirty word by the 1960s and '70s.
Building on — but in many important ways rebelling against — this two-hundred-year backdrop, the twenty-first century is clearly shaping up as the Entrepreneurial Age. This new economic era, which actually began in the late '80s, is unlike anything we've ever seen in its depth and scope. It is being led by ordinary individuals of all ethnic and political persuasions and is affecting hundreds of millions of people in every corner of the globe. Meanwhile, those same Fortune 500 companies that gave us the "organization man" are today promoting a culture of "corporate entrepreneurship" as a way to compete and survive in the global economy. Government leaders of all political stripes have also finally discovered that developing a more entrepreneurial economy is the best way to create jobs and achieve sustainable economic development. It's mighty hard to summarize in one paragraph the importance of entrepreneurship to individuals, companies, and countries, so here are three more:
Individuals. The growing popularity of individual entrepreneurship, propelled by the folk-hero status of the likes of Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, has captured the imagination of people everywhere, especially the young. The fact is, getting entrepreneurial could very well be the best weapon for individuals to prosper in the future world economy. It's no longer an alternative lifestyle for a few go-getters. Preparing yourself to survive by your own wits is an absolute necessity in a downsized and uncertain world. Indeed, it seems everyone these days is thinking about entrepreneurship. And well they should. It is truly everyone's last line of defense.
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Return to the July/August 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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