The Memes of Entrepreneurship

May 15, 2008 – 9:37 am

Among many other things, the story of coworking is a story of entrepreneurship.  While it may be as much about community and the gathering of urban tribes, there is an awesome amount of entrepreneurship going on too.

This may contribute to what will be a slow and awkward courtship between mainstream corporates and the independents that thrive in coworking spaces…Why?

Memes of Entrepreneurship

In Management 101 textbooks, few management topics are as misunderstood and mis-taught as entrepreneurship.  Despite the fact that some 85% of all business worldwide are relatively small family businesses, small businesses (and entrepreneurship) get part of 1 chapter of coverage at best.

Generic corporate thinking is suspicious of entrepreneurs.  In the October 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review, David Garvin and Lynne Levesque state it bluntly: New businesses require innovation, innovation requires fresh ideas, and fresh ideas require mavericks…But most mavericks, sadly, can’t tell the difference between good and bad ideas. They follow this with a quote from (former Home Depot CEO and current Chrysler CEO) Robert Nardelli, where he says: There’s only a fine line between entrepreneurship and insubordination. 

There you have it: mavericks and insubordinates.  That is, people who you really can’t trust.

What this is really saying is that these are people who say NO to being a Yes Man, NO to turning up and putting in face time in exchange for a so-called career.  Entrepreneurs are people who, frankly, are just asking for a little more out of life.  They ask for something new, different, challenging.  They’re not content with doing the same thing, everyday, with no possibility of entering into a fresh experience.

Jim Collins Gets It

In his forward to Fast Company’s Greatest Hits, Jim Collins boils down what for him are 5 premises that summarize the Fast Company generation:

Premise 1: Work is not a means to an end: it is an end in itself.

Premise 2: If your competitive scorecard is money, you will always lose.

Premise 3: Business is a mechanism for social change- for good and ill.

Premise 4: Entrepreneurship is a life concept, not a business concept.

Premise 5: Performance is the fundamental requirement.

Wow! For me this nails it, particularly #4.  Entrepreneurship is a life concept…

What are some of the memes, then?  Independence, determination, results, acceptance of risk, need for excitement, desire for a challenge…

What are some other memes?

The Butcher 

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Credit Risk

May 14, 2008 – 2:28 pm

Any member of a well-known American family whose last name is Bush.

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Joint Venture

May 14, 2008 – 8:18 am

A particular type of party, common in college, where students venture down the highway and smoke copious amounts of joints.  See…I Can’t remember what to see now?

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Design This!

May 14, 2008 – 8:07 am

org 

Bandit and I are now deep into the writing part of our book project, and every now and then I surface to look down on what it is we are doing.

We are trying to make sense of the unfolding relationships (plural, because there will be many) between independent/independent-minded Millennial technologists and creatives, on the one hand, and BigCo, on the other. 

I now realize that, at least in the language and vocabularly of traditional organizations and traditional B-school think, what we are puzzling over is in fact Organization Design.  In most instances, the notion of organizational design is approached like this or this, which is an absolute fucking joke!

Nowhere in any of these approaches will you find recognition of the fundamental disaggregation of creative labor that currently undergirds the world of corporate innovation.  Big firms (P&G, Intel, Sun) that are trying to understand and leverage the values of open innovation now realize that much of the creative energy and input that will drive their innovation agendas actually reside outside of their organizations, in the talent clouds of creative and independent designers, developers, and engineers who work either on their own or in small shops of peers.

Whether it is this sort of insourcing for no-collar creative talent, or outsourcing for white-collar labor in India or Malaysia, most of these activities never show up on a company’s Organizational Chart.  Organization ‘designers’ claim to inscribe a company’s strategy into a set of roles, processes and relationships which, once the switch has been turned on, set in motion the execution of stratey.

Right!

Further, they reify hierarchies that often only exist in the minds of those situated near the top, and which are ignored by those actually doing the hands-on work.

Sorry guys, this is not the way it works.  There are more moving parts in a successful, innovative firm than can appear in one of your ’designed’ Org Charts.  Organization Design, in a post-execution competitive world, will present a small skeletal staff of people who work at HQ, then beyond that will be an orbit of many moving parts and satellites communicating with HQ in different ways.

Now that we understand this, I want to take back all of the lectures I’ve given over the years on Organization Design.  What a load of shit.  Huge apologies for that!

Any organization that is flexible and adaptive enough to succeed over the next 10 years will be, in the traditional sense, undesignable.  Or, at most, co-designed.  But definitely not designed.

Th Butcher  

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B-School Professor

May 12, 2008 – 7:52 am

A weak person of average intelligence who has neither the toughness to make it in the business world nor the intellect to make it in a legitimate academic discipline.

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Why Business Schools Suck

May 12, 2008 – 7:42 am

b school 

This phrase, Why Business Schools Suck, is a lead-in to the article, Business Schools Laid Bare, in the April issue of CNBC European Business.  The article lays out an argument similar to the one made by James O’Toole and Warren Bennis in their HBR article from a couple of years ago, How Business Schools Lost Their Way.  We’re just reporting…you get to decide.

Each of these pieces (as well as the general editorial position that we advance here) suggests that business schools suffer what some call physics envy, that is, the desire for management studies and management research to be highly scientific and highly scholarly.  Problem is that over the past 50 years or so, as business schools have clawed their way to credibility within the university sector, they have become increasingly separated from the actual world of business and business practice.

Business school professors are incented (I know because I used to be one) to publish their work in a rather narrow range of academic journals, each of which has a ranking in a hierarchy of quality.  One receives quality points for publishing in these journals, and 0 points for publishing books that any busy manager might actually read.  Peter Drucker had close to 0 quality points after 50 years of being the most influential business thinker/writer ever!

NotHarvard.com 

The CNBC European Business article points out, interestingly, that the most successful book ever published with ‘Harvard Business School’ in the title is What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes From a Street-Smart Executive (by Mark McCormack).  Similarly, just think about the careers of people like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and the thousands of other successful entrepreneurs who got to the top by learning from doing.

Wow! What a concept!

The Butcher

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Inbox Null

May 9, 2008 – 4:07 pm

I’ve been listening to a lot of talk about inbox management techniques. I think I’ve stumbled on the optimal solution. People don’t send e-mail if they know you’re not listening.

It’s not enough to ignore their e-mail. If you don’t reply, they will either 1) optimistically assume you haven’t had time to read it or 2) conclude you’re a jerk.

Instead, you have to tell them you’re not listening. I recommend an on vacation message or it’s out of the office equivalent.

I will be working out of the office May 7-8th and will have limited access to emails during that time. If you need immediate assistance, please contact Sandra O’Shaughnessy by email or at ext 1234.

Keep it up until e-mail volume is at acceptable levels or leave it up permanently to enhance your guise of significance Change messages to keep them guessing.

Some will cry, “But what if it’s important!?!?” If they can’t be bothered to track you down, then it’s not important. If all of our e-mail was important, we wouldn’t be bitching so loudly about how much we receive!

Try to find solutions like this on Lifehacker…

- Bandit (improving productivity since 2005)

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Creditor

May 9, 2008 – 8:14 am

One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions (from ‘The Devil’s Dictionary,’ by Ambrose Bierce).

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Nomads and the Original Affluent Society

May 8, 2008 – 10:02 pm

Some years ago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins published a little booklet called The Original Affluent Society.  In this piece, he suggests that the elephant that big fat white dudes like Rush Limbaugh seem to really love- anglo civilization- is actually more trouble than it’s worth…

Sahlins pulls together data from myriad anthropological studies to demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, nomadic hunter-gatherers actually spend less time working for their subsistence than we do in postmodern America.  The caloric intake of small scale hunter-gatherer groups is high enough to provide a healthy life, a respectable life expectancy, and, most importantly, a balance between work and life.

Cyber Foragers Today

Flip to the present…As we have spent time with independent, nomadic entrepreneurs in the inspiring world of coworking over the past several months, we see many things that remind us of Sahlins’ originally affluent society.  From what we can tell, very few of the independent entrepreneurs that we’ve met aspire to Bill Gates-scale wealth.  They are working to live the lives they want to live.  That’s it.  They have enough and, as one of our inspirations did earlier in the year, even manage to go skiing at Banff every now and again….Snowboarding in the Candadian Rockies is affluence!

This speaks to nomads’ lack of greed, selfishness, and lust for materialism.  Nomads are ever-dependent on each other for their well-being.  Coworking is premised on this simple principle.

Nomads work to have enough, and then they move on to the next moment.  Be here now…And tomorrow.

Till then.

The Butcher

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Best Advice You Ever Received?

May 7, 2008 – 10:10 pm

A recent article in Fortune explores the ‘best business advice’ that several well-known business leaders received along the way in their careers.  Nell Minow, cofounder of the corporate governance watchdog The Corporate Library, says that the best advice she ever received was to not hesitate to work part time when it fit her life-schedule.  That balance has helped her over the long haul.

This has prompted me to think about the best advice I’ve received, and I am totally stumped.  I keep thinking and thinking, and it makes me realize how fucking selfish I really am.  I can hardly recall much advice at all, I just seem to hear my own voices.  But that’s another story…

This said, make sure you never take any advice I might offer, as it will probably be total shit.

On a sunnier note, what is the best advice you’ve received about business, work, career?

The Butcher

Posted in Work, Article | Comments (1)