Why Entrepreneurs Effect Change

Entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to effect change by having a purpose larger than themselves, being totally engaged in what they do, and constantly striving for mastery. This is no Zen koan. It’s the ultimate formula for building a successful enterprise and a successful life.


Entrepreneurs are change agents. They find new ways of doing things that make the old ways obsolete. They recontextualize problems in new ways and create simpler and more elegant solutions. What accounts for this?

American business culture is dominated by financial incentives. The more you produce, the more you are paid. Entrepreneurship is different. A Steve Jobs, the people at Google, Facebook, and other burgeoning companies that are changing the way we live certainly have an interest in profits. But with them it’s different. Profits are a source for doing more of what they do better. It’s not an end in itself. Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s comment when offered 1 billion dollars for Facebook at the tender age of 22. He refused saying that he was working on an important social revolution and wasn’t selling out.

These entrepreneurs and others like them are largely influenced by three dominant attitudes: autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Entrepreneurs don’t like to be told what to do. They value their independence. Their projects engage them. They pull them in and pull the best out of them. They love what they do and are continually captivated by it.

They are also often driven by a purpose larger than themselves, whether it’s inventing a new way for people to relate, gather information, or turn fast food into healthy meals. Whatever they engage in, they usually bring a critical difference to what they do, one that makes others’ lives better.

And they want to master what they do. It’s the work itself that they are truly interested in, not the bottom line. To them, concentrating on the bottom line would be like a basketball fan going to the final game of the NBA playoffs and spending the entire game watching the scoreboard. It’s about the game. If you play it with passion, commitment, and mastery, the scoreboard takes care of itself.

In a series of experiments at MIT and Princeton by Arieley and Glucksburg, participants were divided into two groups. The first was given a financial incentive, and the second was given autonomy, purpose, and an opportunity for mastery. The results were instructive. In tasks where problems had to be solved, the latter group outperformed the former group by a wide margin. In routine tasks, those with financial incentives outperformed the more creative group.

The researchers further found that financial incentives routinized tasks. It gave participants tunnel vision and made them less creative. The reward rather than the work drove them and disconnected them from other considerations. Too much of this and you get visions of rats trained to press a lever for food pellets. The second group, on the other hand, was infinitely more creative and productive. They were engaged in what they did and were fully conscious of its implications. When you’re constantly considering the impact of what you are doing, it’s less likely your moral sense will go to sleep on you.

When we look at business case studies in light of these studies, we see further validation for their conclusions. In an era of global, almost Darwinian competition where markets have been fragmented into niches where customized solutions are demanded every day, it is the creative, engaged, autonomous, and purpose driven enterprises that are thriving. The best example of the routinized, financially incentive driven companies are those on Wall Street that have recently imploded and our less than successful automakers in Detroit.

That’s the reason that entrepreneurs effect change. It’s hard wired into who they are and how they do what they do. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose: we can no longer think of these as some “feel good” mantra. It is an unfailing formula for successful enterprises and successful lives.

Keep the faith.
Live your life.
Take care of one another.

Leonardo

Balance Your Life or Integrate It?

Living a balanced life is almost impossible when the demands of work and family create continual stress and frustration. There are never enough hours in the day or long enough weekends to recover. But integrating our lives, finding a way to create that place of our own where we get paid for doing what we love and what we’re good at is not an impossible dream. It’s something that people less talented than you and with fewer resources are doing every day. You don’t have to settle for less.

One of the great challenges of working in the 21st century is having some balance in our lives. The pressures of work, the needs of our families, and our own need for some personal space all seem to conflict, leaving us wondering if it is all worth it as we hit the alarm clock in the morning and get ready for another day. It’s an exhausting process that sometimes seems relentless, sometimes punctuated, if we’re lucky, by occasional vacations where we might have enough time to unwind, and after a few days finally feel that we are our old selves again.

There must be a way out of this trap; but the only way to find it is to understand how we got there in the first place.

According to the Conference Board, a job is just a place to get a paycheck for over 50% of the American workforce. Most people are dissatisfied with their work, not really interested in what they do other than for financial reasons. They do what they have to do rather than what they want to do. This dissatisfaction and sense of alienation during the largest part of the day inevitably builds stress, a stress that can’t be relieved in the few short hours before bed or in a weekend, particularly when the needs of family are continually calling.

The stress builds cumulatively over months and years, and as any therapist will tell you, it has to be released. With little time for leisure or recreation, too often it results in acting out our frustration with those who are closest to us. Spouses fight, and children are yelled at, adding guilt and frustration to the mix. There is no way to balance this type of equation. If some form of serenity or life satisfaction is your goal, you just can’t get there from here. Something radically different is necessary.

Popular culture doesn’t provide any satisfactory solutions. We’ve seen stories of the harried chief executive chucking it all and starting a new life working in an ashram (Damages) or living a simple life as a cab driver (The Razor’s Edge) but you have to ask yourself whether this just isn’t walking away from the problem rather than solving it.

There is a great deal of research (Seligman, Ben-Shahar, Bennis, Csikszentmihalyi, Collins, and others) that indicates pretty clearly that people who work in an area that really interests them, using their talents to the fullest extent, and aligning their personal goals with their professional goals, have the greatest job satisfaction, least stress, and better relationships with their families and the people they work with.

It’s not rocket science. If you’re doing what you love and what you’re good at, it’s not what people call “work”. It’s more being who you really are all day. It’s recapturing your identity and not being one person at work and another every place else. The self is no longer divided with two pieces pulling at each other. The tension dissipates. You go home a lot more relaxed. You can share your day with your spouse and kids because you’re giving them a piece of what you are rather than the frustration that comes from being someone else. You don’t have to act out because you were your authentic self all day. You can share your plans and dreams rather than frustrations. Of course there will be difficult times, but you’re living in a whole different context.

A few people can find that kind of working environment in an established company, but for most of us it involves entrepreneurship, creating our own enterprise. This sounds like a daunting task to some, but what is it really other than finding what we love, using our talents to pursue that, and doing it in a way that creates something that people will pay for.

In the final analysis, it’s just integrating your life and making it all one piece. All it takes is some creativity, a lot of faith, and a lot of courage. It isn’t easy, but as so many people less talented than you prove every day, it can be done. For most, the dreadful alternative is doing what you don’t like, doing things that you have to do and that you’re not that good at, at living a life of mounting frustration.

Creating an enterprise is not some impossible dream to fantasize about. It’s something that hundreds of thousands of people do every day. If you think it’s impossible, think about the tens of thousands of micro enterprises that are springing up in that half of the world where the average income is less than two dollars a day, and where there’s almost no infrastructure like the roads, electricity, and internet connections that we take for granted. Maybe there are so many new ventures in those places, so many that succeed, because the people there realize that they have no choice if they really want to live.

When you realize that you really have no choice if you really want to live, you will begin and you will succeed as well.

Keep the faith.
Live your life.
Take care of each other.

Leonardo

When Knowledge Isn't Power

Knowledge is power when we deal with the familiar; but entrepreneurs, the inventors of tomorrow, often dwell in the domain of the unknown, which demands curiosity, resourcefulness, and courage. It is the way that the future is created.

Knowledge is power…except when it isn’t. My favorite example of when it is comes from an enterprise named after this phrase. The KIPP Schools (“Knowledge is power program”) are the most successful inner-city college prep programs in the nation, succeeding in areas where the public school systems gave up years ago.

Combining longer school days, rigorous academic programs, a culture of achievement, and intensive continuing support, KIPP produces inspiring results. In neighborhoods where the high school drop out rate exceeds 50%, 90% of students at KIPP charter schools graduate and go on to college.

In urban settings where schools can be hobbled by bureaucracy, poor leadership, and inadequate teachers, KIPP provides a life- changing alternative. By getting the fundamentals right where they have often gone wrong, their schools are having a major impact on education nationally. KIPP is an excellent example of “knowledge is power”. It prepares students to participate in today’s world by focusing their attention on achievement and giving them the skills to attain it.

But entrepreneurship is filled with examples where knowledge is not power. Entrepreneurs aren’t as concerned about today’s world as they are in creating tomorrow’s. They often deal with the unknown, creating new things or new ways of doing things that no one thought of before. This requires not so much knowledge as attitudes like curiosity, resourcefulness, and courage.

These attitudes spring from a love of what they do. Loving what they pursue, they are naturally curious about it. This kind of passion gives them an endless inquisitiveness and fascination that fosters creativity and innovation. When you really love it and have to do it, you become resourceful. You don’t let obstacles stop you.

When the obstacles get really big, if the passion is big enough it produces courage. How much do you really love it? How much are you willing to put on the line for it?

This is the place where entrepreneurship separates itself from “business”. Business is about making money and giving people what they want. So also is entrepreneurship. But entrepreneurship adds another element that dominates the others: the enterprise is often a statement, even a definition of who the entrepreneur is. He defines himself through it, bringing all of himself to it.

At its best, the statement is, “This is who I am; this is what I stand for; this is what my life is about.” For most people, there is something eerily unfamiliar about this. They are used to holding something back, needing a margin of safety, often wanting to please people and find agreement, all of which give them some security in their lives. But entrepreneurs discover their security in different things.

They are secure in who they are, what they can contribute, and what their world should look like. Clarity of vision gives them an almost transcendent sense of faith in what they do. They see something better than what surrounds them in the seen world available to them and others. But it is more than a vision; they actually experience its reality and are driven to make it real to others. They know what it is. It is very clear to them. Initially, they just don’t know how to do it; and that is how the entrepreneurial adventure begins.

Knowing and not knowing simultaneously may be the Zen-like koan of true entrepreneurship. It is not for the timid. But it is in this state that the future begins. Knowledge is power; but not knowing in acts of exploration and creation can be even more powerful.

Keep the faith.
Live your life.
Take care of each other.

Leonardo

Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Enter the New Entrepreneurship

We humans thrive in an environment that affirms our identity, gives us purpose, a sense of community, and empowerment. Unfortunately, many businesses are so focused on their mission and short term profits that people are disempowered and work at the level of survival. The “New Entrepreneurship" provides a way that not only affirms identity but also creates community, purpose, empowerment, and profits as well.

People thrive when they work at what they love and what they are good at. In one sense, this seems intuitively true, but for the cynical it may seem too good to be true. Fortunately, the work of prominent psychologists like Martin Seligman and James Hillman confirm that doing what we love and what we are good at is not only the key to success, but also to a fulfilling life. Look no farther than Steve Jobs and listen to his Stanford commencement speech to see a great example of how he followed his heart and did what he was good at in building Apple Computer.

When you remember this you realize that most businesses have it backwards and many of us sell ourselves short. Most large organizations are driven by a particular mission and short term profits. The mission is expressed through a series of objectives and outputs, and people are hired to fulfill particular functions. The process begins with the end in mind and people are squeezed into slots to fulfill that end. No wonder the Conference Board reports the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with their work, and two thirds could care less about their company’s objectives. Not a healthy way to live. Work just doesn’t work anymore.

Enter the “New Entrepreneurship” as an answer to these and some other problems in the workplace. New Entrepreneurship starts with the person, deep inside, to pull out what he really loves, and then find out what he’s good at. These two factors are than vectored and research is done to see where they can be used to give people what they need. Jim Collins describes this winning set of intersecting circles as finding what you love, what you’re good at, and what people will pay for.

But it’s more than that and it’s more than just a formula for success; it’s a statement of individual integrity. It’s wanting to be whole and have a real life instead of being a drone. Living life on your terms rather than someone else’s. It’s about “Identity”.

But it’s more than that as well. It’s about community and generosity of spirit. We can’t function and most don’t want to function alone. Like Max Weber said, “we live in the web of our relationships”. We need family, friends, and community. We need to be part of something greater than ourselves, and this is where the New Entrepreneurship really distinguishes itself.

New Entrepreneurs are particularly interested in two communities that they serve: the one inside the organization and the one outside. It’s not about building a firm, a company, or market, so much as it is about building a tribe, a group of people with common interests who want to go in a common direction, united by leadership, communication, and action. Tribes are about empowerment. The depth of common interests, fueled by leadership, communication, and action, empowers the members, bringing out their distinct talents, making them bigger and more of who they are rather than trying to wedge them into a function. People thrive in tribes and tribe thrive through the mutual empowerment of their members.

This empowerment manifests in some members of the tribe working to create something for the other members who support them. Think Apple Computer, a tribe united by a love of technology, high style, and a devotion to breakthrough products. Tribe members who work there love the culture, the values, and the product, and the leadership tries to bring out the best in them and give the tribe members who support them the very best they can, not just the excellent, but the extraordinary.

The result? Members (not staff or workers) that are excited and proud to be working as part of a new technology movement, and other members who can’t wait for the next product to come out. Sure it’s business; but it’s much more than that: it’s a movement, and movements are about empowerment and purpose and change.

And then comes the part that we all crave and are at the same time often uncomfortable with: the New Entrepreneurship embraces transcendence and values. That means that New Entrepreneurs don’t invent new brands of cigarettes, strip tropical forests for hardwoods, or exploit children. Their mission is to make people’s lives better, not just make a buck; and they also know that there is something bigger out there, something intangible, like an idea, bigger than an idea, indefinable, exquisite, just past our understanding that seems to hold things together and pull us forward.

It has a lot to do with faith and little to do with religion. People often confuse the two. Faith is knowing what you know, even if you can’t prove it, that certainty which you don’t know where it comes from. Religion is a set of beliefs, doctrines, maybe the faith that others expressed in the language and conditions of another time that has ossified into dogma. The former is animating; the latter can sometimes be deadening.

Identity, empowerment, community, purpose, and transcendence, that is what the New Entrepreneurship is about. It’s not for everyone, but it’s like rain in the desert for those who are ready for it.



Keep the faith
Live your life
Take care of each other,

Leonardo

Next Blog: How to be a New Entrepreneur and start a tribe: Step 1 of 12