Imperatives and Personal Issues

Imperatives and Personal Issues

The calling I feel to the field of entrepreneurship is admittedly aberrant. As a management professor and practitioner specializing in entrepreneurship, I very much feel like an ancient knight who has vowed to valiantly battle an evil foe, that foe being economic ignorance, stagnation, distress, inefficiency and suffering. Entrepreneurial behavior has been, is, and will probably always be mankind’s central weapon in the economic battle to progress, grow and seek utopia. Entrepreneurs have always been the champions of fresh worldwide economic activity and the advance of civilization through their pioneering inquisitiveness, vision, restlessness, impatience and determination to change the world. I find it euphoric to be around entrepreneurs, who in the final analysis, are different; and as such, can inspirationally advance a peoples’ competitive advantage and sustainability. I sense that great entrepreneurs' seem to emit energetic auras that can act like a spiritual elixir that constantly energizes those around them. Such energy has certainly motivated my own creative study, theorizing and writing. My goal is to help you the reader become motivated and committed to thinking systematically in your endeavors so that you can exploit the fresh opportunity and truth associated with entrepreneurship. There is a mastery challenge you must face personally if you are to be effective in acquiring the imagination and other attributes that are the essence of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship has always been with us and always will be a part of civilization’s march. Even in the most savage and uncivilized of times, man had to systematically and creatively manage the quirks, dangers and demands in evolving eco-systems, environments and nature in general, as societies attempted to progressively extract an economic living, always entrepreneurially changing and manipulating systems to survive, and when possible, to progress civilization to more advanced conditions. Though the unique economic concept we know today as entrepreneurship was not yet imprisoned by the word "entrepreneurship," even ancient people were imagining what could be, and then behaving creatively, adaptively and progressively in organizations to deal with their fluid economic situations, as every emerging society must continue to do to this day. Not surprising, the word entrepreneurship, itself, has grown in importance with the economic advance through time, as mankind has industrialized to cut an ever-sharper and more rapidly evolving economic edge. I contend that our entrepreneurial skills must continue to grow in relative importance for modern mankind (perhaps even geometrically), as we pressurize this world with mass populations that have escalating material needs, wants, desires and awareness.

Entrepreneurship, in its purest form, is the single most salient management force, which drives the cutting edge of competitive advantage and leverages sustainable growth in progressing societies. The sequential and continual surges of advanced wants, desires and visceral human behavior are personified in the leadership and ideas provided by the entrepreneurial orientation. The masses are learning to expect that entrepreneurs will constantly evolve a more diverse and complex socio-economic existence on this planet to which we all will be well connected, and to which we are all entitled. Note that this is an important philosophical assumption I make. Also, note that this assumption about the desirability of innovation, change and progress is not universal and, in fact, is the basis of modern mankind’s most controversial ideological disputes, including the differing view points that lie at the heart of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

When the systematic and scientific study of capitalistic economics began sometime in the latter part of the 18^th century, the study of entrepreneurial behavior naturally took center stage. In all emerging and growing capitalistic societies, entrepreneurs were found to be the change agents that grew the great organizations, sometimes out of seemingly nothing, which attract impassioned participants, stakeholders, journalists, theorists, practitioners and thinkers who naturally get involved, pay attention, study and chronicle the experience. Early economists, in particular, emerged as professionals to describe, nurture, influence and harness the magical entrepreneurial systems that naturally grow wealth, affluence and freedom. In the early days of the industrial revolution writers like Ricardo, Mills, Smith and Cantillon romanticized about the fresh managerial styles (some explicitly referred to the term entrepreneurship) that were revolutionizing economics and had to understood and manipulated, at the cutting edge. Throughout the blossoming history of economic thought, from the field’s infancy, entrepreneurs have continued to be written about and targeted by policymakers with a special excitement, romance and possessiveness.

Take Adam Smith’s famous entrepreneurial metaphor "the invisible hand." This amorphous, human power was fresh and had the great capacity for motivating the will and the heart of the burgeoning capitalist world. Entrepreneurial spirit became the springboard from which social thought and mass economic debate would henceforth flow. Invisible hands, driven by the imaginings of change and growth, suddenly stimulated a new mindset and worldview that had to be protected, fostered and even defended to the death by people of integrity. This magical, underlying force of progress was seen as the new "good," because it was the best bet against suffering and want. Free market philosophies were gaining great momentum at the end of the 18^th century, only to be accelerating even more today, in spite of the Osama bin Ladens of this world. The mainstream scientists and practitioners that followed Smith have become committed to learning how the most successful entrepreneurial systems powerfully and efficiently drive capitalistic systems; and how to manage them better to produce economic success and happiness. The constant advance of creative sellers, buyers and other participants like those found in modern America’s freely competitive capitalistic systems, personify Adam Smith’s "invisible force." The behavior of America’s entrepreneurial citizens, consumers and managers is clearly the purest and most extreme case of economic creativity ever witnessed. American entrepreneurship is uniquely aggressive, and tends to beget the freest and most innately motivating form of civilized human economic energy ever discovered. America’s entrepreneurship energizes and leads modern economic markets in unimaginable ways; at least not imaginable to most of the world, yet.

The entrepreneurial style that embodied Smith’s kind of freedom and open society is especially appealing to Americans, and has flourished more here than his beloved England. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs work best in open and free systems of people who are not bogged-down with excessive restriction and intolerance, who are ultimately free to contribute to nature, synergistically pushing and pulling toward progress. That's why America is the world leader in just about everything economic and socio-economic, and will stay the leader in the foreseeable future. Entrepreneurs spontaneously erupt in the American economic system more than any other organized political-economic system. Like a muscle car, entrepreneurs must have straight-aways where they can be wound-out every once and a while; and America represents the long straightaway and testing-ground. What a great social experiment Americans have created for the invisible and magical forces of entrepreneurship. Americans are the true believers, and the more loyal and aberrant American theorists, like me, must chronicle the events as we see them.