Tech Crunch had a terrific interview exerpt from an interview with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, who suggests we are now all entrepreneurs. Below is an extract from this interview.
“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. . . . Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. . . . You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders. And so, they’re essentially an entrepreneur. . . . They’re entrepreneurs in terms of the business of themselves and how they drive that. So it’s how they get, like, their next job opportunity, how they get a promotion. All of that stuff comes from how they manage the network around them.”
I agree to a certain degree that we are all entrepreneurs, that we are ‘running our own business ‘selling our skills, experiences and expertise to those who will pay us. Some of us are selling our time in exchange for tasks performed, whilst others are selling our time and creating value – in my view this is the fundamental difference – value creation.
I am not sure that every individual is now an entrepreneur in its truest sense, just like everyone who runs a business is not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is about innovation, creating new value streams, taking calculated risks, being willing to back yourself and passion.
“Some people, at some stages in their life, feel a powerful urge to build an organisation that will do something, or produce something, that has not been done before. When they put these urges into practise they become entrepreneurs.” This is entrepreneurship, as defined by John Legg and Kevin Hindle in their book “Entrepreneurship – How Innovators Create the Future”. Incidentally, Kevin was a former lecturer of mine, who I suspect would disagree with Hoffman on this topic.
We would welcome others views on the topic, as it one that I think holds a lot of interest for people. It would be interesting to understand your view on this, particularly in the context of careers and work.
2 Comments
Agree that employees may be small business owners but not necessarily entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs start new types of businesses. Ones that employ novel solutions (innovation) to commercial opportunities.
Interesting, entrepreneurship has this persona of having to create something totally new that has never been done before. This idealism is true and false. True in the sense that new value has to be created but false that it has to be something totally new. Apple didn’t really create a new computer in the truest sense; they took an existing offer and made it appealing to a different audience and yes they use a different operating platform.
I would agree, I don’t think all employees are entrepreneurs, some are just happy to tick boxes, punch key pads, answer phones, collect their pay that’s it. Entrepreneurship or entrepreneurialism seems to me to be just the new and trendy word that blends inventiveness, innovativeness, creativeness, all in one bucket to try and rationalise or intellectualise what is really the basic fundamentals of what all great businesses would be wise to harness—that is, know your market in your industry, don’t rest on your product development laurels, never be happy with the status quo and seek out the next frontier, have both short and long term goals (financial, NPD, marketing etc) and don’t be afraid to be bold! On the contrary, large organisations often cannot handle this level of boldness (or as others would say entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship) therefore those employees who get the buzz of thinking outside the box, doing things differently, looking at things differently, wanting to try something new generally get viewed as cowboys, loose cannons, corporate lunatics etc.—sad really because its those employees that make the biggest difference to organisational progress.
In the end, again no not everyone is an entrepreneur in my opinion but those who want to be creative, different, challenging, passionate about change, learn, look outside the box etc are definitely entrepreneurs—its more of a question about whether organisations small or large have a way to harness all that energy.