A podcast based on the winning principle that entrepreneurs need only know the laws of economics plus the minds of customers. After that, apply your imagination.

133. Ulrich Möller: The Video Game Industry Points to the Future of Organization Design

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Austrian economics has a lot to say about how to organize firms for maximum value generation. Austrian principles point to the delegation of entrepreneurial judgement to the front-line employees who interact directly with those who actually create value: users.

The military organization models of the twentieth century, involving command-and-control in hierarchical structures, are slow to change, and the management literature evidences an unwillingness to abandon the hierarchy. But there is a fast-growing industry that’s the locus of prodigious value generation where the hierarchy has already been abandoned and flat networks of distributed judgement are taking its place. Ulrich Möller is one of several Austrian economists who are studying the firms in the video game industry and demonstrating how their findings can bring positive organizational change to the rest of the business world.

Download The Episode Resource “The Future of Organization Design” (PDF) – Download

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Organizational innovation has a long and successful track record in the video game industry.

A lot of value has been generated in the video game industry in a short period of time. Video games surpass movies and music in revenue. Without a long history of corporate hierarchies and bureaucracy to shed, firms in the industry embraced the organizational innovations of open source software, including anonymous collaboration among highly distributed self-organized teams, peer review systems, and agile processes.

In addition, the industry created its own laboratory for testing revolutionary organizational theories in virtual economies set in virtual worlds.

Valve is a company in the video game industry that took organizational innovation to its logical conclusion: the end of hierarchy.

Valve — a very successful, industry-leading company — pursued a value-generation logic to frame its approach to organization:

  • Creativity is our core resource — the most important skill in game development.
  • Creative employees are key to our capabilities.
  • Creative people are most productive when left to express their own creativity in their own way.
  • Hierarchy blocks creativity, as do planning and routine.
  • How do we design a company to attract and retain the sort of people who are able to take the boldest creative steps?

The answer? Let employees decide what to work on. Let them exercise entrepreneurial judgement. Let them, in effect, do both strategy and implementation. Give them all the decision rights. Let them identify customer preferences — since they know the customer best; let them decide how best to address those preferences; let them decide how to achieve competitive differentiation; let them allocate resources, choose costs, and manage profitability; let them control quality and decide when software is ready to ship.

Employees work in self-organizing teams, and are free to migrate from team to team, and free to change their roles. There are no fixed job descriptions.

In place of command-and-control, a few simple rules or constraints have emerged for the exercise of governance.

F.A. Hayek wrote about norms that emerge in social groups to shape behavior. These are not legislation, i.e., written formal restrictions. They are what he called rules, constraints that everyone accepts in the shared commitment to collaboration and the pursuit of the most favorable outcomes.

The most significant of these rules at Valve is the “Rule Of Three”, a simple agreement that at least three individuals must agree on the initiation of a new project, or on other major decision points. The emergent standard was that this is just enough to prevent maverick behavior, and a low enough number to facilitate agile action that’s not bureaucratically constrained.

Another rule or constraint goes by the name of Social Proof. This is a broader and looser peer review standard. If the original team wishes to recruit more members, they must persuade others of the value generating potential of the project (in competition with other projects in the firm); successfully doing so constitutes “social proof” of value.

Rules-based peer review process replaces management structure.

Conventional approaches to organizational design focus on structure. This might be command-and-control hierarchy, or structured networks, or strategic business units or functional departments. Valve abandoned structural thinking and replaced it with flow analysis. How can we attract the most creative people to our venture? How can we encourage the most productive flows of bold creative thinking? How can teams best assemble and collaborate for the most productive output? How can we integrate with the user community in the best way? How can the most value-generative projects attract the best resources?

These are all questions about flow. Austrian economists are distinctive in viewing capital as a flow rather than a structure, and this view holds true for human capital just as much as physical capital. Emergent rules for self-organizing human systems can perform all the managerial functions that were historically left to control structures.

Actionable Insight Summary

  • Design your organization for flow not structure.
  • Design to attract the most entrepreneurial people in the most entrepreneurial roles (self-selection).
  • Let them self-organize.
  • Let rules and value codes emerge.
  • Teams as business units.
  • Eliminate the boundaries between the firm and customers and other partners.

Additional Resources

“The Future of Organizational Design” — our E4B Knowledge Graphic (PDF): Download PDF

“Levels without Bosses? Entrepreneurship and Valve’s Organizational Design” by Ulrich Möller and Matthew McCaffrey: View Paper

“Entrepreneurship and Firm Strategy: Integrating Resources, Capabilities, and Judgment through an Austrian Framework” by Ulrich Möller and Matthew McCaffrey: View Paper

132. Saifedean Ammous on Knowledge Entrepreneurship

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Saifedean Ammous is a knowledge entrepreneur. He creates new knowledge that’s valued by his customers, because it helps them to think better and better informs their actions. He carefully appraises the knowledge provided by great thinkers of the past, and re-presents in a newly compelling fashion. He develops effective memes and ideas. He innovates in channels and distribution. He demonstrates how knowledge entrepreneurship can work in the 21st Century’s globally-connected and digitally-connected economy. He joins the Economics For Business podcast to share some of his learnings and experiences

Download The Episode Resource “Knowledge Entrepreneurship” (PDF) – Download

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

Collect available knowledge then develop a new perspective.

Saifedean took degrees in economics and engineering, at bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. levels. His accumulated knowledge was valid for the university professor track. Then his spontaneous knowledge accumulation efforts took him to Austrian economics and a new perspective: that the economics he had learned to date didn’t make any sense, and that regime higher education was best understood as just another malinvestment. Most importantly, regime higher education was customer-less: it did not provide value for customers, because that was not its purpose. From that point on, Saifedean followed the path of customer sovereignty and of exploring what customers identified as valuable.

Teaching is value generation.

Saifedean’s first customers were students in his university classes. He was able to generate value for his students by teaching them the economics they wanted to learn, along with giving them the optionality of seeing the knowledge through his distinctive perspective. When students engage and say thank you, it’s a signal of value.

A transformative event precipitated a shift into independent knowledge entrepreneurship.

In Saifedean’s case, the transformative event was Bitcoin, the study of which opened up a deeper understanding of hard money and low time preference. He “upgraded” to the Bitcoin Standard by exiting academic teaching and switching to entrepreneurial knowledge sharing. The first step was writing and publishing a book called the Bitcoin Standard (conventionally published by Wiley) and then leaving academia for the joys of hard money.

He switched his platform for teaching from the university to the internet, and now is able to reach many more customers — citizens of the world who want to learn more about Austrian economics and to understand Bitcoin and hard money. How did he know they were out there? They self-selected via Saifedean’s twitter feed.

The “factory” for knowledge production and distribution is a website.

A fairly basic website (i.e., not requiring any technological expertise or gear that is not available to everyone) is the platform for the new level of knowledge entrepreneurship. At saifedean.com, customers have been able to:

  • Receive and read book chapters as they are written;
  • Access video and audio online courses in Austrian economics;
  • Buy books;
  • Subscribe to podcasts (which he runs like a seminar);
  • Find a “complete central bank replacement pack”.

Saifedean told us he is just getting started, and there are more knowledge innovations in the pipeline.

The Entrepreneurial Method.

This unfolding timeline is an excellent example of the entrepreneurial method at work.

  • Start with what you know.
  • Find motivation in what you are passionate about.
  • Utilize available resources.
  • Let collaborators and customers self-select in.
  • Use networking and influencers rather than conventional advertising and marketing to drive expansion.
  • Let spontaneous order unfold.

In addition, Saifedean associates the Austrian concept of lowering time preference with entrepreneurial success. Low time preference — willingness to save/sacrifice in the short terms for benefit in the longer term — is an essential part of the entrepreneurial method. One of the entrepreneur’s “bird-in-the-hand” resources is their individual utilization and allocation of their personal time and effort.

A new age of entrepreneurship is emerging and surging.

In The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean looks back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a period of technological innovation by entrepreneurs under the gold standard, bringing us indoor plumbing, electricity, the internal combustion engine, airplanes and elevators, among many more. Entrepreneurs were able to accumulate capital in the form of wealth stored in hard money to finance their innovations.

He believes that the emerging Bitcoin Standard era will precipitate a new entrepreneurial flourishing, further accelerated by free software, network access, blockchain and hard money savings.

Additional Resources

“Knowledge Entrepreneurship” — our E4B Process Map (PDF): Download PDF

Saifedean.com

The Bitcoin Standard (in over 20 language translations) 

The Principles Of Economics 

The Fiat Standard 

“Austrian School vs. Neoclassical School” (PDF): Download PDF

Twitter for Saifedean.com: @Saifedean

Twitter for Saifedean Ammous: @SaifedeanAmmou6

131. Saras Sarasvathy On The Entrepreneurial Method

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The scientific method has served us well to date. The entrepreneurial method, informed by the principles of Austrian economics, can take society much further. Dr. Saras Sarasvathy joins the Economics For Business podcast to distill the essence of the value-generating and wealth-producing method.

Download our knowledge graphic for the Entrepreneurial Method.

There is an entrepreneurial method — a systematic way to achieve the unpredictable.

The scientific method aims to discover universal laws that make the future predictable. If we have enough scientific understanding we can, for example, build bridges that we can predict will not collapse. We can construct an entire scientific infrastructure in our society.

The entrepreneurial method aims higher, at human flourishing. It aims at discovering how we can all work together to achieve our human purpose, including new purposes that we all agree are worth achieving. We can construct an entrepreneurial structure to build a better human life and a better society.

Entrepreneurs choose a control strategy that’s appropriate to uncertainty.

Some people fear entrepreneurship because its outcomes are uncertain. But this is worrying about the wrong things: outcomes are outside your control. Entrepreneurs are more discerning about what can be controlled: means.

Dr. Sarasvathy lists several control strategies:

The Bird-In-The-Hand Principle: work with what you’ve got and can control, which she sums up in the questions: Who Am I? What Do I Know? Whom Do I Know? What resources do I own or control now? This is the first principle of control.

Affordable Loss Principle: Entrepreneurs can control their downside, making it affordable and limiting uncertainty, by asking “What one value generation project would I undertake even if I risk losing everything I invest In it?”

Crazy Quilt Principle: How do entrepreneurs control the uncertain process of identifying the right partners, including hiring the right people? They don’t try to predict the results of hiring and pitching. Instead, don’t hire, don’t ask. Just talk to people — those who fit best will self-select into your project.

Lemonade Principle: Don’t fear the unexpected. Welcome surprises. All unexpected happenings are opportunities and can become resources. Leverage contingency, and make lemonade out of lemons.

The Pilot Is The Plane Principle: Everyone on the plane is a pilot, co-engaged in shaping history. The plane will reach a destination, the exact nature of which is unclear, and everyone on the plane contributes to getting there.

There are some guidelines that entrepreneurs have established over time.

Non-Predictive Action Is The Driver

Everything in the entrepreneurial method is driven by action. Or, more completely, action, interaction and reaction. Things you care about, things you can actually do, things we can do together, and how we handle surprises. Interacting with the environment with a sense of purpose, and thereby changing it in some way.

Even-If Thinking

Our aspirations and the outcomes we experience may not be symmetrical. Not succeeding is not the same as failing. Even if a new idea does not work out, what is the worst that can happen? We shouldn’t make decisions just because we can’t predict the future. Embrace the unpredictable but make sure the downside is under your control.

Intersubjectivity

The great productivity of entrepreneurship comes from intersubjectivity — two or more people can interact and come up with something neither one had actually thought about or dealt with or considered or contemplated before. Intersubjectivity is more than interpersonal and beyond negotiation. It’s a question: “I am doing this. What do you think?”

The Entrepreneurial Method leads to social good and a new role for business in society.

A side effect of everyone in society learning the scientific method was the emergence of the middle class, defined by income. Science brought productivity which enabled a large swath of society to earn enough money to escape poverty. Everyone was able to harness science.

Let’s teach everyone the entrepreneurial method. Let everyone start companies, grow companies, invest in companies, all with no thought of prediction. A middle class of business will emerge, defined not by income but by venturing. This middle class will produce more jobs and more enduring, more stable companies, embedded in strong communities, with greater well-being and less churn. The fruits of creativity take root in endurance and durability — not in Schumpeterian creative destruction — and contribute to stability and the taking on of bigger challenges. Decade after decade, the middle class of business will generate value and produce wealth, employing lots of people and educating successive generations to take the entrepreneurial method with them into a better future.

Additional Resources

“The Entrepreneurial Method” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_131_PDF 

Among the innovations planned for the Economics For Business platform is a series of encapsulations of important research papers. Here is a sample:

“The World-Making Scope Of The Entrepreneurial Method — An Encapsulation” By Gabriele Marasti (Original paper: “The Middle Class Of Business”): Mises.org/E4B_131_PDF2

Some links:

Effectual Entrepreneurship (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_131_Book

“What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?” (PDF) Mises.org/E4B_131_Paper

“Entrepreneurship As Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_131_Article

130. Eamonn Butler’s Primer on Entrepreneurship and Its Social Good

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Entrepreneurship is the great force for social good — in fact, the greatest force for good in the history of civilization. It’s the system of continuously improving the lives of others so we can improve our own lives. Through entrepreneurship, we can achieve greater and greater levels of community, collaboration and societal advance. Eamonn Butler, Co-Founder and Director of the Adam Smith Institute, has written what he calls a Primer for understanding and appreciating the wonderful institution of entrepreneurship. He highlights some of the key points on the Economics For Business podcast.

Innovation and improvement.

To continuously improve people’s lives, we need new things. We need people to invent things that haven’t been thought of before. And we need innovators, people who improve those things and find new purposes for them or new ways of producing and distributing them. And we need entrepreneurship, the marshalling of resources to produce these better things faster and more efficiently and get them into more people’s hands.

Entrepreneurs are those unique people who organize the marshalling of resources, and who risk their own capital and their investors’ capital in this pursuit of a better future for all.

Cascading Development.

When entrepreneurs undertake this act of discovery, and especially when they succeed, they trigger cascading development. One innovation and entrepreneurial initiative leads to another. They are all aimed at making people’s lives better — easier, healthier, more convenient, more affordable, more efficient. And, eventually, knowledge spreads, and people’s lives are transformed, so that Indian peasant farmers can check produce prices on their smartphone and get the best offer from the market. Development cascades from individual to individual, firm to firm, market to market and country to country. It’s never-ending improvement.

Long-termism and ethical behavior.

The outcome is long term uplift and benefit for all. Entrepreneurs are long term thinkers. They are focused on the lifetime of their company and their products, and perhaps to passing them on to the next generation (Politicians are the opposite — they can only think in election cycles).

Entrepreneurs don’t want to just make a short term profit and then leave the market. They want long term revenues and long term profits. That means creating reliable, returning customers who love the entrepreneur’s product. That requires delighting those customers, serving them impeccably, never letting them down or breaking a promise. There are few other, if any, institutions that are constituted in this way.

This Long-termism is ethical. Entrepreneurship is ethically driven.

Internationalism

A small firm can trade on a global stage, and if they can, they will. It’s easier than ever before in the digital era. New and better ideas quickly spread around the world. But it has always been the case, since the earliest of times. Politicians establish borders to divide people, and then violate them in invasions and wars. Entrepreneurs see no borders between people. Political borders can’t divide markets.

Social good.

Entrepreneurship achieves more for social good than any other institution. Entrepreneurial innovation in goods and services enhances life and opens up new possibilities. Customers flock to entrepreneurs because of the tremendous service they deliver. The constant improvement delivered by entrepreneurs constitutes civilizational progress. The competitive pressure to improve quality and utilize resources more efficiently generates more and more value for the world.

It’s an error to see business as extractive — extracting and using up resources. Business is generative, putting life-changing inventions at the disposal of the global population. What’s seen is the dirt and smoke left over from mining or manufacturing. What’s not seen, and is often unappreciated, is the huge amount of good that comes into the world via entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is the application of property rights at every scale.

It’s another error to think of entrepreneurship as small business or young and immature business. Ray Kroc of McDonald’s was a great example of an entrepreneur who worked out how to operate a hamburger restaurant at global scale with continuous improvement. Entrepreneurship requires property rights; people need to have control over their property in order to transform it into marketable innovations and services. But that does not limit the scale of entrepreneurship. Property rights are a principle that supports global scaling.

The entrepreneurial method.

Probably the best way to define entrepreneurship is as a process or a method. It’s akin to — and as important to civilization as — the scientific method, but different. They both involve trial-and-success, coming up with ideas and testing them. The scientist tests against reality, looking for a law, a repeatable outcome that will never vary. The entrepreneur tests against consumer approval, looking for acceptance that might be repeatable until conditions change, such as new competition arriving. Entrepreneurs can’t predict the future as scientists can, and they can’t exert control in the form of unchanging laboratory conditions. Yet they still are challenged to build a business that lasts.

Can we nurture this institution?

Yes. In school, via literacy and entrepreneurially-oriented education, teaching young people about profit, and uncertainty and the requirement for supportive environmental elements such as property rights and flexible labor laws, and the value of trying multiple different initiatives before discovering a winning proposition. We might not be able to teach successful entrepreneurship, but we can create the conditions for learning.

A selection of books by Eamonn Butler

Entrepreneurship: A Primer: View on Amazon

Austrian Economics: A Primer: View on Amazon

Classical Liberalism — A Primer: View on Amazon

Ludwig von Mises — A Primer: View on Amazon

Friedrich Hayek: The Ideas and Influence of the Libertarian Economist: View on Amazon

The Condensed Wealth of Nations: View on AdamSmith.org

129. Samuele Murtinu on How and Why Governments Fail in Venture Capital

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Governments would like to take credit for the level of entrepreneurship in their countries. Entrepreneurship leads to value creation (happier voters) and economic growth (more to tax). But, as Per Bylund points out in the Seen, The Unseen And The Unrealized, governments’ actions restrain entrepreneurship.

Dr. Samuele Murtinu joins the Economics For Business podcast to explain both how and why governments fail in their best efforts to help entrepreneurial businesses succeed.

Key Takeaways And Actionable Insights

Europe has an entrepreneurship problem.

European economies exhibit lower growth rates than the US. At the firm level, there are fewer unicorns, and fewer new technology-based firms or innovative startups and innovative ventures in general. Venture capital markets are very thin, and most venture financing is debt, which is (as Sergio Alberich described in Episode #123: Mises.org/E4B_123), a poorer choice for startups and young firms than equity.

Consequently, European countries see a lower level of innovative startup behavior. Existing firms have low levels of R&D spending. And, generally, there is an inability to turn the innovative inputs that are available into innovative outputs — new markets and industries tend not to emerge in Europe first.

And the European mindset tends to favor the idea of the entrepreneurial state — the state is thought to be where good ideas and good initiatives come from.

Governments see launching their own venture capital funds as a new means.

The key idea of the entrepreneurial state is deep involvement in economic affairs, including funding basic research, financing, shaping and directing R&D investments, and thereby creating new markets. The centrally coordinated state is seen as the driving force for the development of innovation and technological progress. For this mindset, government venture capital seems to be an available means. So governments start and implement venture capital funds — the terminology is Public Venture Capital.

These are companies and funds that are fully owned, fully funded (no limited partner structure) and fully managed by government bureaucrats, with the purpose of investing in innovative startups.

Firstly, Governments get the concept wrong at a fundamental level: they have the wrong goals.

Private venture capital funds and even hybrids like sovereign wealth funds have clear goals: rapid, high-level capital appreciation by investing in startups at an early stage and exiting as quickly as possible in a liquidity event such as a commercial sale or an IPO.

Government venture capital may have “social” goals such as encouraging industry sectors, favoring regional technological development, boosting economic growth, and providing jobs. These are vague and unclear, and may contradict individual company business plans (such as automation and minimization of labor costs). With the wrong goals, it’s impossible to succeed.

For example, the selection process for private VCs choosing firms for fund portfolios is rigorously goal-directed and VC firms have honed their candidate identification and due diligence processes in order to maximize their chances of winning from the very first steps in the investment process. Government funds lack this clarity and therefore can’t develop the requisite expertise.

Governments have difficulty letting go of control.

Private VC’s have also honed the role of the contract between them and the firms in which they invest, and with the limited partners who provide the investment capital. The contract with the startup firms is as “hands-off” as possible (see, for example, the SAFE contract — Simple Agreement For Future Equity — available for free download and free use from the Y-Combinator website: YCombinator.com/Documents) and the contract with Limited Partners gives them no role in the management of the fund. Private VC’s understand that high levels of control are not appropriate to the adaptive management of immature firms in rapidly changing environments.

Government bureaucrats directing investments in startups are averse to this kind of hands-off management.

Governments can’t get incentives right, and consequently can’t hire the best executives.

Private VC managers are highly incentivized. In the largest and most successful funds, they receive high salaries and a 20% participation in fund appreciation. The best individuals from the most prestigious business schools are hired to compete with their peers for promotions and partnerships. The most successful funds attract the most capital from the deepest pocketed sources, and the cycle of success rolls on.

Public VCs can’t attract the same quality of human capital. Typically, managers are paid a fixed salary, which can’t be seen as out-of-bounds from the perspective of bureaucratic rules and standards. If there are bonuses, they are calculated in what Professor Murtinu called a “gloomy” way. No-one is going to break any income-equity norms.

Professor Murtinu’s rigorous data-rich analysis proves beyond any doubt the failure of Public Venture Capital.

In order to analyze Public Venture Capital performance, Professor Murtinu utilized the VICO database, a comprehensive data set about venture capital backed companies in high tech industries in seven European countries. He reinforced it with additional data sources, and was able to run a comparison of the performance of firms that received public venture capital backing and those that received no venture capital. The data sets covered 25 years.

The result: no statistical difference between the performance of the two sets of firms. Public Venture Capital had no effect. It was a waste. This was true across all possible variables: productivity, whether total factor productivity or partial factor productivity like labor or capital, sales growth, employment growth, innovation outcomes, exits.

The opposite is the case for private venture capital backed firms. In the same kind of analysis, private venture backed firms are statistically superior on every dimension. The overall impact of private venture capital is very clear and highly positive.

There is one possible step in the right direction: government becomes a limited investor.

Public venture capital can syndicate with private venture capital, and so long as the investment is less than 50% of the fund total, and has no say on selection of investments, on due diligence, on governance, on monitoring, and on timing or type of exits, it is possible that the investment outcome can be positive. The European Commission is currently considering this role for Public Venture Capital.

Additional Resource

“Public vs. Private Venture Capital” (PDF): Download PDF

128. Matt McCaffrey: Austrian Business Strategy (Part 2): Principles

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Austrian economics helps entrepreneurs to develop and implement more effective business strategies, and to open up streams of continuous innovation. As Joe Matarese, CEO of Medicus Healthcare Solutions, said about Austrian economics in relation to business: It just works.

In episode #127, Matt McCaffrey outlined the Austrian strategy process of Explore and Expand, and its logic development. This week, he helps us dig deeper to identify the principles of Austrian economics that underpin our distinctive approach to business strategy.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Realism: real people, real markets, real entrepreneurs in real firms.

Mainstream economics has never been able to help business, because of its focus on math, models, and prediction. Real people and their decisions and interactions and motivations and emotions can not be captured in equations and mathematical functions.

Austrian economics has carved out a particular area of focus in the behavior of real people in its study of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Austrians examine real entrepreneurial decision-making day-to-day; they highlight real people experiencing value and entrepreneurs’ role in generating that value. From this base, Austrian economics investigates how individual actions and choices and interactions lead to the formation of markets.

Dynamism: The market is a process.

Austrian realism sees the market as a dynamic process, continuously unfolding in interaction and innovation and change. Mainstream economics, with its preference for the greater mathematical tractability that comes with abstraction, has no capability of dealing with this real-world dynamism. The embrace and study of dynamic processes gives Austrian economics much of its applicability in business. The business world is never static. It can’t be understood in abstractions. It’s real and messy and changeable and unpredictable.

Uncertainty and complexity: embrace emergence.

Uncertainty is a keyword for Austrian economists. It’s a term that describes the real world in which entrepreneurial businesses operate. They can never know for sure what comes next; they can’t anticipate all of the interactions between competitors, changing customer preferences, technological advances and social and economic trends. There is no sure-footed way to plan for the future. Austrians recognize uncertainty and help businesses think about how to cope with it, how to narrow it, how to accumulate knowledge to lighten it, how to weigh decisions in the environment of uncertainty.

The new scientific term for uncertainty is complexity: in any system, the interactions are so many and their results are so unpredictable that modeling and forecasting are impossible, and outcomes are defined as emergent (i.e., outputs happen in a way that is not predicted by merely combining inputs). Austrian economics helps businesses deal with emergence.

Subjectivism: People are people, both as consumers and as providers.

One of the realistic principles of Austrian economics is to deal with people as people: we are all subjective in our valuations and judgments and emotions. We are not homo economicus: perfectly rational (in the mainstream economists’ definition of rational) in objectively weighing benefits and their opportunity costs. If all we are doing in producing goods and services for consumption is trashing the planet, then we can’t be rational, in their eyes.

In order to understand business and understand entrepreneurship, it is absolutely necessary to begin with subjectivism. Consumers’ subjective values ultimately determine what is produced; if consumers don’t value something, producers won’t make it. On the producer side, entrepreneurs’ subjective valuations of the resources they have available to them to assemble in a production process affect the value of their business.

It is entrepreneurs’ subjective evaluation that results in the identification of new uses for a resource, and the introduction of new innovations. Subjective values lie underneath every new business relationship with customers, from streaming movies to google searches to online travel booking. Subjectivism is everywhere in the economy and in business.

Time: How to plan in the present to satisfy customers in the future.

Austrians are unique in their understanding of the economic role of time in business. Entrepreneurs deal in future time. They imagine better futures in which customers enjoy greater satisfaction, and then they imagine how to bring it about and act on their imagination. Production — getting from imagination to consumption — takes time. Entrepreneurs are dealing with buying decisions in the present (such as hiring and buying inputs) for selling decisions in the future. They can’t know future prices or future customer preferences, so it’s a bet.

The consumption decisions customers make today reflect entrepreneurial decisions that were made weeks, months, years or decades in the past. Austrian economics helps entrepreneurs manage the contingencies of time.

Time makes the customer the boss.

Austrians utilize the concept of consumer sovereignty as an analytical tool. It means that consumers are the ultimate decision-makers in all economic systems, because what they buy or don’t buy determines what is produced. Their power is a result of the time it takes to produce. The value of resources that entrepreneurs assemble today depends on what consumers think and feel in the future.

Forecasting is tricky and best avoided, but patterns can be recognized.

A consequence of time and consumer sovereignty is the fragility and inaccuracy of forecasts. How is it possible to forecast consumer tastes in the future? There are some exceptional entrepreneurs who get it right. What’s their secret? Austrians’ understanding of dynamics and complexity can help point to the processes most likely to be associated with success, without attempting to forecast it.

One alternative to forecasting is pattern recognition. Jeff Bezos said that consumers are unlikely in the future to ask for higher prices, lower quality or slower delivery. That’s pattern recognition. It’s generalized and broad based and lacking in precision and specificity. But there is a consistency to some patterns that entrepreneurs can recognize and act upon, adding their own idiosyncratic insights and guesses to shape the actual value propositions they will make to consumers.

Out of all this emerges the Austrian entrepreneurial method.

We’ve all been educated in the scientific method. It’s utopian: experiments conducted with strict controls will yield the truth.

The entrepreneurial method is different, but with equal status, and greater applicability in open — i.e., human — systems where control is not an option.

It’s a bit messy and hard to characterize with precision, but it’s nonetheless real. It starts with imagination — imagining a future in which customer dissatisfactions are addressed and resolved. Their world is made better. This is proactive creativity on the entrepreneur’s part, triggered by existing highly dispersed knowledge, including tacit knowledge, held by the entrepreneur and others.

The entrepreneur designs a business model that might be able to resolve the identified customer dissatisfactions in the future and assembles resources that he or she believes, in the right combination, could accomplish the task. There’s no correct way; the entrepreneur draws on the realism of Austrian economics to best understand the challenges and how to address them.

The entrepreneur then advances with her or his own form of experiment. It’s not controlled in a closed environment. It’s a hard commitment of resources in a definite format to make a value proposition to customers. The experiment consists in ascertaining the customer’s response: like or dislike, buy or not buy, use and enjoy or use and reject? The experiment does not end there. It is continuous — receive the result, decide on how or whether to change the proposition, and try again.

Gut feeling or intuition or personal subjective heuristics all have roles to play in entrepreneurial decision making. Austrian economics captures these phenomena in the concept of judgment under conditions of uncertainty.

Organizing for the exercise of judgment.

Since judgment is the ultimate generative energy in producing value for customers, and since it’s personal and individual, how do firms grow? If judgement rests with a single entrepreneur, such as a founder, growth can’t scale, and will quickly reach its limits. Austrians have the organizational design solution: delegated judgment. Austrian leaders are able to design and implement non-hierarchical organizations in which every employee is empowered to exercise entrepreneurial judgment.

They do so by substituting value codes for authority. Value codes are the unwritten codes (although they might be found in the employee handbook) and conventions of “how we do things around here”, how we generate value for customers, the mission and purpose and internal methods of the firm.

Additional Resources

“Austrian Entrepreneurial Principles” (PDF): Download PDF

Austrian Perspectives on Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Organization by Nicolai J. Foss, Peter G. Klein, and Matthew McCaffrey: But It On Amazon