PREFACE

In light of all the diversity in the universe, how do we understand unity?

A study by CMU, entitled “The 1997 Entrepreneurship Vitality Scorecard: The Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area,” concluded that Western Pennsylvanians face a real entrepreneurship challenge. We don’t seem to have the demographic and psycho-graphic profile (the right kinds of people) to compete entrepreneurially with the rest of the state, region or nation. The entrepreneurship equation calculating vitality is quite simple according to the study; a region without the right demographic profile cannot imagine, start and grow new enterprises like the rest of America. Western Pennsylvania no longer seems to be the "keystone" of the American political and economic progress, and the study implies that we may not have the character to change this pace.

At first, I was deeply distressed by this report, being a Western Pennsylvania entrepreneur and mentor of entrepreneurs. I take a lot of pride in being an American from Pennsylvania; and CMU’s findings hurt. The Pittsburgh region, in particular has always been the gateway to the west, and has birthed many industries and innovations; because we are, and always be the keystone of the nation and economic system. My perspective on management revolves around this idea of systems; that systems and forces are interrelated and produce patterns that must be identified and wisely used. A systems thinker carefully appreciates complexity, and questions simplistic answers. In this case, he imagines larger interrelationships that challenge the picture from the CMU study. A systems thinker realizes that the equation which would define creative economic reality in any given locale, at any given time is a very complex interrelationship among social, economic, political, cultural, natural and diverse other forces. A simple profile of some static demographic mix may not depict the true entrepreneurial state of vitality, at all. Entrepreneurship is a complex concept that is defined in contexts that are a part of a vast network of natural, social and economic factors that mysteriously interact with each other to create a myriad of counter-intuitive leverage points that are unimaginable to most people. Systems thinkers should therefore not accept partial models of Western Pennsylvania’s entrepreneurial dilemma, which are limited, discouraging, and only stifle the imagination.

The CMU report's primary weakness stems from the fact that demographics operate mostly at a micro-level. CMU’s “senile population” hypothesis is interesting and provocative, but it ignores a large set of other factors, especially the macro and micro interrelationships, that drive entrepreneurial activity in a given setting like Western Pennsylvania. As a behavioral scientist that specializes in economic development, entrepreneurship has been the central concept guiding my life’s work. The more I have studied it, the more I have come to appreciate its complexity and nuance; and the more I have come to realize that I need to know more about macro and micro interrelationships, and that I need to become better at “systems thinking”. I've gradually learned that entrepreneurship is an intricate concept, one of the most complicated economic and management constructs ever invented, which invariably means that it tends to be poorly defined and used capriciously by literally everyone, including my prestigious colleagues at CMU.

Entrepreneurship is a specific, temporal and extreme form of management that can and does occur in every community, setting, as well as in individuals of every age and status group. Trying to categorize types of entrepreneurs and the contexts where it occurs best and most often is tenuous. It is simply the fuzziest management concept I’ve studied, and cannot be adequately addressed without explicitly, or at least, implicitly, using the tenets of systems theory. It’s not surprising that more recently entrepreneurship has emerged from the strategic management field as an exciting specialty that has spawned interest from politicians, sociologists, economists, and participants from all social science fields. There is such a diversity of study that, generally, the meaning of entrepreneurship depends on whom you are talking to, and why. Different authors, situations, perspectives, and eras conjure up their own special views what entrepreneurs do and who they are, and what entrepreneurship is; and the confusion is propagated ever more as the field expands. It is therefore not fair for me to over-criticize the CMU study for this same reason. Capriciously constructed concepts and studies about them are simply part of modern economics. But again, rigorously applying systems theory to the study of entrepreneurship can help unravel some of the complexity, and help us see why CMU might be very mistaken.

In John Nesbitt’s book, The Global Paradox, he predicted that the smallest players, paradoxically, become the most important in dynamic and fluid markets striving for economic progress. Quite ironic forces are imagined to exist in Nesbitt’s future, when you think of it.

Entrepreneurship is such a hot topic in America because it appears to be "the" most vital and exciting behavior in our pursuit of human progress, and of course, the American dream, as well as the most threatening to us. Professional planners, consultants and practicing managers who study and practice entrepreneurship, however, cannot fall prey to oversimplification. Professionals with integrity need to know about the true patterns of the innovative economic interrelationships associated with entrepreneurship. Systems thinking provides a sound intellectual and philosophical foundation for management in general and especially for entrepreneurial management, which is the most esoteric and risky form of management thought. This proposition holds true whether you are from Western Pennsylvania, Nome, Alaska or an emerging economy. In this book, I try to do four things that I believe will help systematically expand the reader’s entrepreneurial IQ and increase their economic odds in places like Western Pennsylvania:

1) I develop “systems” as a perspective from which effective thinking, studying and learning about entrepreneurship can occur in advanced capitalistic societies like the USA.

2) I describe some special interrelationships and forces that connect the entrepreneurship system to other larger systems and that internally hold the entrepreneurial organization together and delimit entrepreneurial systems from other managerial systems.

3) I debate the desirability of various micro and macro strategies for influencing economic progress and their relationship to entrepreneurship as we know it, and to the next level of entrepreneurialism needed for the 21^st century.

4) I help the reader develop personal imagery and visions for becoming a part of it all.

The idea of imagery is particularly important to any system thinker interested in the study of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial people are dreamers at the edge as much as they are doers in reality, and their organized systems are therefore particularly innovative, adaptive and often far-out. I’ve seen it argued by some (e.g., William Blake) that imagination is human existence. For this reason I employ many tactics to get you to exercise your imagination. I use metaphors, similes, allegories, analogies, adjectives, opposites and continuums to help you triangulate the immense reality that surrounds us; and I regularly ask you to use your imagination to see life and the future from different perspectives. Our imaginations are the only part of us that doesn’t have to live in the present or what is known. Our body’s living existence is bound by each inhale and exhale we undertake, but our inspired ideas, dreams and visions of the future are not. An infinite array of interconnections between history and destiny can live in the mind’s eye. But, this quality of the imagination makes it highly vulnerable to error and malfunction. A flawed entrepreneurial vision leads to pipe dreams that are doomed to economic failure. Similarly, the inability to learn from past lessons about economic truth and reality stifles true economic creativity. Learning about our imaginations and using them effectively is vital to the maturation of the person as well as the manager.

“Imagination is the process or power of forming a mental image of something that is not or has not been seen or experienced; creativity or resourcefulness" (American Heritage Dictionary, 11^th Ed.).

I try to use a conversational style, which is reader-friendly; even in those places where I address some deep, complex and controversial issues relating to philosophy, mathematics, economics, politics, organization, opinion, inquiry, ethics and so forth. Complicating the presentation throughout is the idea that entrepreneurship is a unique and advanced management behavior that is, and must be, constantly evolving to a higher order of sophistication and responsibility as mankind modernizes. Entrepreneurship uses imagination to produce an extreme type of management that, by its nature, is advancing the cutting-edge of organizational knowledge. I thus assume that it is basically the marriage of imagination and entrepreneurship that drives progress at the frontier of virtuous and good organization. Also, permeating my presentation is an abiding advocacy for stewardship. I thus focus on the brighter side of entrepreneurship (knowing full well that there is a darker side), where society begets an abundance of entrepreneurs who are stewards that are less motivated by short-term profit, more cognizant of social responsibilities, and more aware of truth. Such entrepreneurs must be very imaginative systems thinkers. The best American entrepreneurs of the future that I envision will be plugged into the total system of life better than ever before, and they will keep getting better. In particular, America’s new entrepreneurs will partner with the rest of the world to go beyond just creating new products and services; they will also create wisdom about good organization. The challenge for entrepreneurship in the new millennia is to produce the types of global organizations that defy the typical structures, patterns, and connections to which we are accustomed, and that create more perceived human value and wealth than ever before. I thus try to be upbeat throughout my presentation.

My vision of the new generation of entrepreneurship involves scenes of great managers who will design and construct more than just better products and services; they will also create effective and efficient hybrid organizations that will have unique qualities and configurations, which redefine traditional classifications of enterprise like public/private, profit/nonprofit or local/global to get the most out of people and capital. The next great generation will be represented by diverse demographic profiles, contrary to what some would lead us to believe. A fresh wave of organizational vision and focus will move goals simultaneously toward a balance between stewardship and material productivity. Entrepreneurs will master some of man’s most infinite contradictions, just as the quality/price contradiction was brought to its knees in the 80’s by the likes of TQM, JIT, SPC and a host of other acronyms standing for a breakthrough innovation in management. Similarly, organizations will simultaneously localize and globalize (local citizen power and discretion over relevant organizations will grow, while still encouraging and freeing these firms to compete more globally). Worldwide progress will become more of a reality, as we finally are able to "think locally and act globally.”

I explicitly recognize in this work that this bifurcation capability will be driven primarily by the advent of the "information age" and the intellectual developments emerging in entrepreneurial management thought; whereby, we are beginning to recognize the immense interconnections of diverse peoples and cultures in our economic systems, and that local needs can not be automatically met with ever-increasing centralized control and dominance. A horizontal organization revolution will stimulate unprecedented awareness, learning, and the innate desire by the emerging, connected masses to participate in progress and change within all economic systems. Mankind is simply finding that it has to retool organizations more often to reduce externalities, while still keeping pace with expectations (sometimes incrementally, sometimes dramatically). Not only are we finding that we need new organizations; we also recognize more that we need to reinvent existing organizations by creating new kinds of interrelationships that are collectively and socially sensitive. We also need to do it at an ever-increasing rate. CMU’s study implies that this escalating environment of change is analogous to an aging Queen of Hearts in Louis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. The Queen had to run as fast as she could to just keep up, let alone think about getting ahead, and since Western Pennsylvania has old Queens; we thus will surely fail. Hogwash! I firmly believe modern information-man has been given the gifts to keep pace, regardless of age or demographic profiles; but only if we face reality and think systematically about the immense complexity of the diversity in life.

I'm an entrepreneurial person who has studied the topic and worked as a practitioner. I certainly felt a calling to do a good job on this book with my primary goal being to help the economic development field develop. To do a good job, I realized that I needed to do a lot more than simply chronicle my experience and provide some conclusions. I got caught up in the spirituality of the topic and found that I had to be philosophical and metaphysical as well as practical and concrete in dealing with the most esoteric of economic and managerial processes. I became engrossed in going all the way back to the roots of entrepreneurship. I searched old literature for philosophical and conceptual fundamentals; then I tried to overlay the foundation with the modern literature to gain scientific rigor. Throughout this effort, I found the essence of entrepreneurship to be elusive and tenuous to define and apply, but I also found the richest entrepreneurial vane right here in America.

I start my discourse by trying to sort through my perceptions of the fundamental issues relating to the history of entrepreneurship in Chapter 1. I build on the ideas of systems thinking and how it applies to entrepreneurship in Chapters 2, and 3. In these early chapters I focus on helping the reader to visualize the mental and social space of the entrepreneurial condition, and more importantly the entrepreneurial organization. I pay particular attention to vocabulary and the works of open systems thinkers that I believe stir the imagination. In Chapter 1, I show how a historical analysis of the evolution of the concept of entrepreneurship brings us to open system theorizing about it. I document the fundamental writings of Adam Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and the more modern works of Keynes, Marshall and Schumpeter, and trace important threads of thought through today’s entrepreneurship theorists. I also propose an approach for more completely measuring the phenomena surrounding entrepreneurship. In Chapters 2 and 3, I flesh-out the ideas of open systems that relate to entrepreneurship. In Chapter 4, I look at the American condition in depth. I build from the Hegelian perspective that the American entrepreneur is truly a cultural event of monumental significance economically, socially and politically that separates us from the rest of the world, especially since the cooling of the "cold war." In Chapter 5, I discuss how we can implement the systems approach personally. I provide insights for developing personal entrepreneurship and tips for exploiting specific opportunities. Finally, in Chapter 6, I provide a compilation (annotated bibliography) of some of the readings I found useful and interesting in preparing this work.

I had hoped that I could assemble, compile, categorize and then decompose the all-time clear and comprehensive world-view of entrepreneurship. Although not nearly achieving this goal, I do re-think, debate and synthesize basic issues that are fundamental to the study of entrepreneurship. Much of the philosophy with which I wrestle in the two systems chapters (Chapters 2 and 3) is embedded in ancient controversies about how nature and man should, and must, interact to make life possible, but I regularly return to the ideas of more modern systems thinkers, which invariably coalesce around America’s particular status and role as it leads modern economic events. You will find that there are clearly a variety of new forces that drives us to be a nation of entrepreneurs.

Throughout the early sections of this book, I try to give the appearance of being scientific, analytic and objective; but don't be fooled, because the study of entrepreneurship is not a mature science by any means. In fact, as you go through this book, I believe you will perceive more and more that entrepreneurial behavior and management is a miraculous, spiritual response to a savage environment, bestowed upon us as part of some higher order. Entrepreneurship is thus metaphysics and art as much as it is science. Being so abstract, the book develops more or less thematically rather than linearly, with ideas and vignettes moving in and out of the mist that attempt to stir your imagination to the soul. I recommend that you read it as such, because that’s life.

My Grandfather and uncles would religiously play Bocce in the front yard of their Heilwood, Pennsylvania home. One day a motorist stops and asks my Grandfather where the road goes. He replied “Anya wherea you wanna.” The life of a systems thinker is a lot like that Falcone anecdote.

Imagine why GE began using a very timely slogan: “Imagination at Work”