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Entrepreneur – Or Entrepreneurial Seizure?

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More often than not ‘entrepreneur’ is used to describe both a passing phase of ‘start up’ and a lasting role of ‘business management and development’.    The two roles overlap to some degree but demand different dispositions and skills.

In the start up phase the entrepreneur is frequently working alone developing a personal vision and finding ways to make it work, in theory.  They are finding investors and developing plans.  They are researching and shaping their still very malleable ideas until finally they have something on paper that ‘works’.  They talk with advisers and potential customers.  But the business is just an idea.  It is not yet a demanding child; a long term commitment.

Sooner rather than later the infant business develops different needs; sales, management (especially financial management) and systems.  The emphasis shifts from the energy and drive of start up to a different vibe of business development.  Energy and drive are still required but so too is discipline and routine.  The business is no longer on paper where numbers can be changed at the stroke of a key.  It is now a real thing where to ‘change a number’ takes real work and often hard cash.  And the business is there, demanding, all day and every day.

Instead of a single person driving a personal vision it now may require teamwork and people management.  The entrepreneur has to morph into a cocktail that includes some or all of; sales, management, bookkeeper, product/service development, operations management and leadership.  A very few make this transition with relish. But for most it proves difficult.

Many entrepreneurs learn to move on with grace.  The passion, skills and energy that help them bring the businesses into life are not well suited to the more methodical and disciplined demands of business development.  Having been responsible for conception they leave the parenting to others.  They bring in professional ‘management’  while they move on.  This IS the entrepreneur.

But for the majority, who are venturing into entrepreneurship for the first time, this early exit to business ownership is not seriously considered.  The business is set up from the start as a vehicle in which the ‘entrepreneur’ can pursue their trade (social media guru, web designer, window cleaner, whatever).  There is no exit.  They have had what Gerber calls the ‘entrepreneurial seizure’.

Gerber recognised that most people who choose to start a business aren’t really ‘entrepreneurs’ as described above. Instead, they are technicians, craftsmen or artisans who have had what he called “an entrepreneurial seizure“. They have become fed-up with their boss, disillusioned by their employer, made redundant, or increasingly have never been employed and decide to start out on their own ‘Enterprise Fairytale’.

This is the entrepreneurial seizure, and critical decisions must now be taken.  Get them right and the transition to ‘entrepreneur’, and ‘business owner’ may be made.  Get them wrong and the entrepreneurial seizure may be prolonged, expensive and painful.  Society may still label you ‘an entrepreneur’ but you will be both boss and labourer, technician, craftsman or artisan.  What once felt like tremendous progress may soon turn into a trap.

If you learn your entrepreneurial skills at one of the worlds leading business schools you will be taught the skills of starting and owning a business.  You will be taught to avoid the entrepreneurial seizure.  If you learn your entrepreneurial skills in more prosaic settings this lesson may not be taught.  Indeed the working assumption may be that helping you into an entrepreneurial seizure  could be as good as it gets.

It might be perfect for you – but it is not really entrepreneurship.

And when the policy makers lament our ability in the UK to start businesses that consistently achieve global scale, I believe it is because we trap so many of our ‘could be’ entrepreneurs in their own entrepreneurial seizures.

Enterprise for All – Wednesday 31st March 2010 Free Conference

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Unleashing Enterprise is creating a partnership for all enterprise educators to pioneer a culture of enterprise across the East Midlands. The partnership is managed by the East Midlands Development Agency (emda) and developed in close partnership with educators, employers, enterprise agencies, policy makers and funding organisations. The programme is helping to facilitate a more cohesive and planned approach to the development and delivery of the enterprise offer in the East Midlands. It is also helping to promote opportunities for all people, but mainly young people, to take up the enterprise skills offer in their schools, communities or places of work.

The annual Unleashing Enterprise conference takes place on the 31st March at the East Midlands Conference Centre. Entitled “Enterprise for All?”, the conference comes at an exciting time for those working in the field of enterprise capabilities with the enterprise skills agenda shortly to be included within the Regional Skills Strategy. With entrepreneurs heralded in popular media as much as in business journals these days, it is easy to assume that enterprise activity is readily understood and accessible to all. But is it? Or should it be?

2010 is a good time to take stock of activity that is being developed along the “golden thread of enterprise” and Enterprise for All will do just that.

Keynote speakers lined up for the conference confirmed thus far include:

  • Mike Chitty, Author of the BLOG, “Enterprise & Entrepreneurship in the Community”
  • Andrew Morgan, Skills and Communities Director at emda
  • Toby Reid, Nottingham based entrepreneur and ex-graduate of NTU’s the Hive and founder of business reality website http://www.inafishbowl.com/

There will also be an enterprise market place showcasing the best of enterprise in the East Midlands. Attendance at the conference is free for delegates and agencies that want to participate in the market place.

If you wish to register for this event please complete the online booking form

Chance for those outside the East Midlands to see what’s going on.

Drucker on Economic Development and the Value of ‘No-tech’

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Above all, to have ‘high‑tech’ entrepreneurship alone without its being embedded in a broad entrepreneurial economy of ‘no‑tech’, ‘low‑tech’, and ‘middle‑tech’, is like having a mountaintop without the mountain.

Even high-tech people in such a situation will not take jobs in new, risky, high‑tech ventures. They will prefer the security of a job in the large, established, ‘safe’ company or in a government agency.

Of course, high‑tech ventures need a great many people who are not themselves high‑tech: accountants, salespeople, managers, and so on.

In an economy that spurns entrepreneurship and innovation except for that tiny extravaganza, the ‘glamorous high tech venture’, those people will keep an looking for jobs and career opportunities where society and economy (i.e., their classmates, their parents, and their teachers) encourage them to look: in the large, ‘safe’ established institution.

Neither will distributors be willing to take on the products of the new venture, nor are investors willing to back it.

Peter Drucker – What Will Not Work

The Leash Fetish

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  • Unleashing talent
  • Unleashing creativity
  • Unleashing potential
  • Unleashing enterprise
  • Unleashing entrepreneurship

These aspirations I see nearly every day of my working life.  There is always something or someone to be ‘unleashed’.

But, where is the leash meister?  The evil one who holds us back?

Most systems of parenting, education and employment are designed to establish control, compliance, conformity and predictability.

Perhaps there are some systemic changes that we might make so that the challenge of unleashing is consigned to the history books?

But the real challenge is to recognise that with the transition to adulthood the leash IS off.  

We are free to choose and to act.  But like a dog that has been chained up for too long – when unleashed many of us have little desire to go beyond our former boundaries.

We ‘know’ our place and we stick to it.

The role of the enterprise educator is not to teach about business.  Nor is it to parade in front of students waving tenners inciting them to grab it!  Nor to put on yet another inspirational conference with a secret millionaire, dragon, apprentice or teenage entrepreneurial prodigy.

It is to help us to recognise that the leash has been slipped.  And we can begin the journey of becoming the person that we want.  And to show us how we can help ourselves and our peers to explore what we might be able to achieve through association, collaboration, perseverance, learning and skill.

This is the role of the enterprise educator.

Mentoring Enterprise – the corruption of a powerful process?

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According to Tim Smit over at the School for Social Entrepreneurs all social entrepreneurs should demand a mentor. Far be it from me to disagree with such a luminary but I think not.   It is this kind of sloppy thinking that says we should ‘universalise the particular’ that leads to powerful processes of creative learning being undermined.
Entrepreneurs should seek to develop clarity on what their learning priorities (and which ‘gates’ they need ‘keepers’ to open), and they should be clear on how they are going to learn.
But the truth is that mentoring, while transformational for some, is next to useless for others.
We all have our preferences for learning process.  This truth is a problem for many enterprise support organisations who default to the ‘we’ll provide you with a mentor’ setting because they are more focussed on delivering their neatly pre-packaged service offer, agreed with funders no doubt, than they are in really understanding the needs of their service users.
Many of the mentoring enterprise schemes that I see use poorly trained mentors with even more poorly trained mentees.  There is a lack of clarity about the importance of choosing and using mentors in lifelong professional development, as the provider short cuts this with a ‘matching process’ to force start their own mentoring scheme.  No wonder that often the results are disappointing.
Such schemes tend to put the mentee in a passive role.  Mentoring becomes a process that is done to them rather than a process to help them find the personal and professional relationships that they need to help realise their enterprising vision.
Mentoring is an immensely powerful tool for professional development and the transmission of wisdom.  However poorly designed mentoring programmes, driven by big businesses CSR ambitions, and wads of taxpayers cash have undermined its credibility in the enterprise sector for many.

All entrepreneurs should understand the power of the mentoring process and how it operates in the REAL world (where it is not funded by taxpayers) as it is likely that most of them might need mentoring at some point in their career.   But is should never be a set component of enterprise development programmes and it is certainly not right for all.

So let us stop grabbing the cash and setting up the schemes and develop an understanding of the mentoring process that will serve our entrepreneurs and our communities for many years to come.