There's a new entrepreneurial capitalism emerging in the United
States. Actually, it's been here a while except that many of us didn't
recognize it at first; many don't recognize it now.
Carl J. Schramm, then president of the Ewing Kauffman Foundation
in Kansas City, Missouri wrote a book about this subject in 2006 called the
"Entrepreneurial Imperative". He recognized what was going on
even six years ago and in fewer than 200 pages does an excellent job of
explaining the reasons that entrepreneurial capitalism has come about.
The old bureaucratic economy that started after World War II ended
a few years ago. In that economy, we were led to believe-and we
still tell our young people-that big business will hire you when you get your
college degree. You can stay there for your whole career and then retire
to collect a nice pension. For a while, it looked like between big
business, big labor and big government, we were all set but funny things
began to happen on the way to the recessions of the last few decades. The
pensions went away and all three, business, labor and government became
bureaucratic and unresponsive to the marketplace.
Businesses that have recognized what has occurred, promoting
and embracing a new entrepreneurial organizationlarge and small that haven't figured it out, are well, not doing so well. The future business environment , have done well, even through
this last recession that started in 2008. Businesses, both will not be dominated by large corporations, but by
smaller, agile, entrepreneurial firms that keep their ears to the marketplace.
The marketplace will choose the winners and losers; the ones that survive
and thrive and the ones that don't.
In spite of the current (US) administration's preference to let
the federal government (instead of the marketplace) choose winners
and losers and the administration's re-distributive economic
policies, we have to presume the new entrepreneurial economy will prevail.
There are too many of us with the entrepreneurial spirit innately within
us waiting to come out.
Just What We Need if We Embrace the Change
An entrepreneurial economy, not only here in America, but around
the world is the best hope of expanding the economic pie, allowing everyone
that wants to work to be successful and build wealth for themselves and their
families. I've learned over the last couple of years that many, many
businesses are started and grown successfully without going through the traditional
"business plan + market research + financing" model. They start
small using with personal savings, credit cards and help from friends and
family and grow successfully as they tweak their business models to meet
marketplace opportunities.
We All Need an Entrepreneurial Mindset
Whether self-employed or working for others, we all need an entrepreneurial mindset for the entrepreneurial economy. Developing the entrepreneurial mindset can be thought of as developing a set of beliefs and assumptions that allow us to view problems and challenges in our world as opportunities waiting for solutions. There have always been problems and inconveniences in peoples' lives that have been solved by entrepreneurs providing solutions for people willing to pay. This will always be the case and the acceleration of change only presents more problems to view as opportunities to solve.
We Need Change in our Businesses, Large and Small.
Existing businesses, both large and small need to develop an
entrepreneurial mindset throughout their organizations so everyone can help
look for new opportunities in the marketplace. People don't buy products
and services the way they did in the past and to survive, businesses must keep
up with the new products and services people want and the new ways they want
them delivered.
We Need Change in our Schools and Colleges.
We need expose our youth to entrepreneurship as a
profession many times throughout our K - 12 school systems. We need to
quit implying that going to work for someone else, after getting a degree, is
the only career option. We need to tell them that there are almost no
career choices that will last throughout their adult lives. We need to
give all our youth the "entrepreneurial mindset" whether or not they go
out on their own. The only successful employers of the future will demand
that employees be entrepreneurial and know how to analyze problems as
opportunities and solve them.
The entrepreneurial mindset must follow our youth into our colleges and universities. Our university business schools must quite teaching graduates how to be bureaucrats in bureaucratic companies and instead teach them how to be entrepreneurial problem solvers.
We'll be offering a new Entrepreneurial Mindset course
via Independence Community College this fall. Developed by the
Entrepreneurial Learning Institute it is co-sponsored by the Kauffman
Foundation in Kansas City. The blended learning format provides for
learning from real-world entrepreneurs interviewed and recorded all over the
United States and Canada. The course is built around the book "Who
Owns the Ice House" by Clifton Talbert. Talbert learned eight life
lessons on entrepreneurship from an unlikely entrepreneur, his Uncle Cleve in
the Mississippi Delta in the late 1950's. Instead of becoming a
cotton-field worker as his contemporaries, Uncle Cleve owned the only ice house
in his community. Uncle Cleve didn't have a lot of money or education and
was certainly not privileged yet he had a successful business serving all
races and classes in his area. Clifton worked with his uncle while
attending high school, learning the eight life's lessons and later helped bring
the "Stairmaster" to market in Tulsa Oklahoma.
The
Entrepreneurial Mindset course at Independence Community College is built
around the "Ice House Entrepreneurship Program" (click here for an
introductory video). Participants in the
Independence area will complete most work via the on line content
with weekly discussion sessions in downtown Independence. Discussion
groups can be set up in other communities. For more information, call me
at 620-252-5349 or email jcorrell@indycc.edu.
