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190. Peter Klein: Why Managers Still Matter:

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Entrepreneurial businesses embrace adaptiveness and change, and continuous innovation enabled by flexible and responsive organizations, empowered at every level. That doesn’t mean there’s no role for managers. Inside the corporation, entrepreneurial management co-ordinates the business flow of responding to changing customer wants and preferences, so that resources are allocated and reallocated to the production activities that customers value the most. In fact, management is becoming more important, not less. Professors Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss explain entrepreneurial management in their latest book, Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (Mises.org/E4B_190_Book), and Peter Klein visits Economics For Business to highlight the key points.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Management co-ordinates the constant flux of entrepreneurial business.

The essence of the adaptive entrepreneurial organization model is responsive change. Entrepreneurial businesses don’t lock themselves in to 5-year strategies and annual plans. They recognize that markets are in constant flux as a result of changing customer preferences, changing competitive activity, changing technologies, and changing conditions in business channels and in the economy. Change is the normal condition. It’s what Ludwig von Mises termed constant flux.

Management is required inside the firm to adapt and respond to change outside the firm. It’s not possible to manage the change in markets, but it is a necessity to manage resource allocation and productive activities inside the firm.

Management is co-ordination and orchestration, not authority and hierarchy.

We might think of the concept of management in its industrial age guise of authority and hierarchy: some people “higher up” in the organization telling others “lower down” what to do. This kind of hierarchical authority can’t work in the digital network age; it’s too slow to process incoming data from the marketplace and too rigid to quickly or effectively implement newly imagined responses to those incoming data.

But in Professor Klein and Professor Foss’s analysis, management no longer equates to old-fashioned authority and hierarchy. Management is co-ordination: assembling the right resources — both human capital and complementary capital assets such as supportive technologies — in the right combinations (often referred to as “teams” in today’s management language) for the right shared task with the right shared goals. Professor Klein likened this to orchestration — there’s a conductor who guides the orchestra in playing the same symphony together, without telling the individual players how to play their instrument, and leaving the details of implementation to the individuals and their specialized skills.

Some orchestras may have better results than others because their teams have been well-recruited and well assembled and they respond better to management co-ordination. All firms and teams are complex adaptive systems, with emergent outcomes influenced by internal forces, one of which is management.

Management is culture more than authority.

How do managers achieve a better outcome as a result of managing their teams? Professor Klein believes that they institute a successful culture, as opposed to designing an organizational structure. He defines culture in terms of norms, customs and practices — the accepted way (or simple rules) of “how we do things around here”. More specifically, in the customer-centric entrepreneurial firm, “here’s how we plan to facilitate value for our customers around here”. Skilled managers paint the pictures — the “vision”, if you will — in the minds of employees of the customer value standards the firm will achieve, and the customer experiences that the firm will facilitate.

Modern managers are comfortable with and quite expert at adaptation.

The modern managerial culture is a far cry from traditional hierarchical managerial authority. It has the built-in flexibility for adaptiveness to the rapid rate of change in today’s digital business world. A well-functioning management process in a loosely structured organization can change internal production processes, teams and resource allocations in response to external changes in customer demand and marketplace conditions.

In fact, Professor Klein points out, through relevant case studies, such a management structure can be better at adaptation than, for example, a network of independent contractors and suppliers that would be challenged to orchestrate responsive changes to an external change, since each would have a different experience and process it through a different cultural orientation. They wouldn’t co-ordinate as well or as quickly as internally managed teams.

In certain cases, management authority can sometimes be a relevant organizational tool, so long as it is applied in a contingent fashion.

The relevance and usefulness of authority varies by circumstance and business situations. Its usefulness is contingent, and managers must be sensitive as to when to apply authority and in what style.

Why Managers Matter identifies two distinct styles of managerial authority, Mark 1 authority and Mark 2 authority. Mark 1 authority is traditional command-and-control, exerted top down — superiors telling subordinates what to do.

Mark 2 authority is exercised through design rather than command: finding the right person for the task, combining the best-qualified people in teams, and giving them a goal with a wide latitude in their process and implementation in achieving the goal.

An important element of the contingent approach is to empathically identify the subjective preferences of employees. Some will respond well to flexible, open-ended direction that enables them to exercise their own initiative. Others might prefer the certainty of clear direction. One type of salesperson might be highly motivated by a 100% commission remuneration plan, another might feel more secure with a base salary with the potential for an achievement bonus upon exceeding quota.

Professor Klein identifies two broad sets of conditions for the exercise of Mark 1 and Mark 2 authority. When there is a high degree of interdependence between people, teams and tasks, such that it is critical that tasks are highly coordinated, completed at the same time and combined in a highly specific fashion, then management intervention is required and it will include Mark 1 elements. When production is more modular, when tasks and projects can be completed interdependently, then Mark 2 management can be exercised through a decentralized, flat and culturally aligned organization. (Professor Klein cited the example of the type of higher education institution where he works; all the professors can design and teach their classes, do their research, and publish their papers and books with a high degree of autonomy.)

Management is becoming more important, not less.

In a rapidly changing world, where employee attitudes and experiences are very different than in the pre-digital world, and where global markets and their interconnected structures are more uncertain and cyclically unreliable, and where the pace of disruptive technological innovation is accelerating, good management is more important than ever for the success of our economy and our society. Smart managers are needed to find the right balance between operational excellence through established processes and adaptive change through adjustment and experimentation, a balance that business scholars call the ambidextrous organization. It can’t happen without management, and without managers.

Additional Resources

Peter Klein’s book page: Mises.org/E4B_190_Klein

Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company by Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss: Mises.org/E4B_190_Book

Public Affairs book page: Mises.org/E4B_190_PA

189. James Kent: Carving A Differentiated Growth Space In A Well-Established Market

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Entrepreneurs always generate new value for customers; that’s what they get paid for. It’s not always necessary to create a new market; there are many creative ways to expand the value potential of established markets and carve out a territory in the new expanded space.

James Kent, founder of the innovative apparel brand Rogue, White and Blue, talks to E4B about the entrepreneurial value creation method he pursues in growing a distinctive and differentiated brand in what might look to outsiders like a crowded market, but which to him looks like unbounded opportunity.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Entrepreneurs start with what they love — it’s the first source of differentiation.

James is a lover of open-air experiences — of walking and hiking and exploring trails and off-road lands, of snowboarding in the mountains, and enjoying all the freedoms of exploration and everything to do with the great American outdoors. “What do I love?” is one of the first questions an entrepreneur asks of themselves, and James is certain of his answer.

Adding knowledge and experience fortifies the entrepreneurial recipe.

All experience and most knowledge are individual. What we pay attention to, and how we learn is always unique to us personally. James picked up some valuable experience by working in sporting goods retail stores, both interacting with customers in stores and working his way up the corporate ladder into management positions. This commercial experience in sporting goods was highly complementary to his love of the outdoors, and the two became a productive combination in James’ entrepreneurial approach.

James was able to gain some even more fine-tuned experience by working as the first employee of a start-up, running an office in a location removed from the head office. This provided exposure to the entrepreneurial experiences of risk-taking, autonomy, maximizing the use of limited resources and using business development tools like Google AdWords — all directly useful for a future business journey.

A third layer of relevant experience came from joining the National Guard in a patriotic spirit of service. The service ethic is fundamental to all entrepreneurial endeavors.

The stage is set: what kind of business to launch?

James asked the entrepreneurial questions. What do I love? The outdoors and outdoor recreation. What do I know? Apparel and apparel retail. What are my resources? Passion, the genuineness and clarity of commitment, design ideas, and a small amount of savings. Who are my customers? People who share the same passions.

Where will differentiation come from? It came from a reservoir of genuine feeling and the combination of two streams of thought: recreational love of the outdoors and patriotic love of country. The combination became the brand Rogue, White and Blue, described by customers as “the patriotic version of Patagonia”. It’s wild and unexpected like the American landscape, and it embodies patriotic design ideas, both in visual look-and-feel and in functional attributes such as Made In America.

The commitment to a differentiated brand platform creates a differentiated supply chain, differentiated production, and differentiated presentation.
Entrepreneurs design their production infrastructure and supply network backwards, starting with the brand and then identifying the system components that will bring it to life.

James had design ideas in his mind. He self-taught himself Adobe Illustrator to get them from his mind into digital documentation, occasionally hiring outside designers on Fiverr at low variable cost for some specific refinement tasks. Modern technologies ranging from design software (and the training videos and additional user content available online for new adopters) to digital printing to internet-enabled collaboration sites like Fiverr can be combined to create a complete value network with limited fixed cost investment.

The next step down the supply chain was to find screen printers and James tested alternatives until he identified the best craftspeople in that specialized profession. He made them his business partners, which enabled him to benefit from their expertise in identifying the right Made-In-America apparel manufacturers and the right high-quality fabrics. By ordering garments through the printers, he was able to give the printers a more profitable business model while offloading some risk (e.g., of misprinting) onto them. The shared value space was big enough for everyone in the network.

The integrated platform of a differentiated brand and a differentiated supply chain is the result of entrepreneurial commitment: to brand integrity, quality, style, and consistency.

Finding customers through entrepreneurial action.

At the outset, there wasn’t any marketing budget for Rogue, White and Blue. How does a brand get customers in those circumstances? Not by advertising but by entrepreneurial action: by meeting customers personally. James had a good instinct for who his customers would be based on input from like-minded friends and family. So, he went out to meet similar people by setting up a sales table at selected events where they might congregate. The first one was a gun show, and then more broadly outdoors-themed events. James vividly remembers the excitement of show attendees stopping by his booth, immediately bonding with the “patriotic version of Patagonia” brand feel — they didn’t need to be told, they understood it without prompting — and paying cash for the products. Rogue, White and Blue started with a batch of 96 T-shirts which quickly sold out.

Growth is funded by cash flow and there is no shortage of growth drivers and growth ideas.

Cash flow is the most important financial indicator of business performance and it’s the most important source of growth capital. Profit is an accounting notion, and debt-financed development has its own set of risks. Cash flow is a pure indication of customer approval and customer value. Therefore, it provides the best funding source for both working capital and investment capital — turning the value experienced by consumers into the funds that enable expanded and enhanced value experiences in the future.

Rogue, White and Blue has expanded into more designs, new apparel items, a strong website to drive sales, and a reinforced brand presence.

Customer feedback loops ensure continuous improvement and progress.

Meeting customers face-to-face or getting their feedback via the internet — these are feedback loops that help entrepreneurs refine their offering. The feedback may concern product quality, design, or brand imagery; it’s all positive input for an entrepreneurial business that is open and not defensive whenever there is criticism.

The entrepreneurial life is exciting.

How are we all going to share in the productivity of the economy? The old way was to take a job and participate as an employee, hopefully ascending the hierarchical ladder of a firm or translating increased experience and skill in a profession for higher wages.

As the digital economy unfolds, and more of the work is being performed through algorithms and A.I. and machine learning that’s translated into process automation, the traditional ways of sharing in economic production will be blocked.

The better alternative is economic participation and reward through entrepreneurship. James Kent describes the entrepreneurial life as exciting and fulfilling. It requires a thorough commitment and it’s hard work — he described the long nights he’s devoted to the Rogue, White and Blue brand — which he finds energizing and motivating. There’s a commitment and a service ethic, and a consequent freedom.

Additional Resource

Check out James Kent’s website: Rogue, White and Blue.

188. Jordan Lams on Finding and Patiently Developing Your Entrepreneurial Focus

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We define entrepreneurship in terms of people working creatively to make others’ lives better. That’s a very broad statement, of course, so it’s instructive to observe how individual entrepreneurs choose to make some customers’ lives better in some specific ways by applying special skills and knowledge. Let’s call it finding an entrepreneurial focus.

Economics For Business talks to Jordan Lams, founder and CEO of Moxie, an industry pioneer in manufacturing, branding, and distributing cannabis products.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

Entrepreneurs find their focus — or, sometimes, it finds them.

Bruce Lee is reported to have said that the successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus. Entrepreneurs develop focus on particular customers, in order to understand them better, empathize with their wants, and deliver them the experiences that they value. Developing this focus may take time, or it may come early in the journey, but empathy always provides the pathway.

Jordan Lams observed the pain of a family member during a time of illness, and how cannabis products could bring some relief and comfort. From that time, he became focused on the health and medical benefits of cannabis in a broad range of personal circumstances.

From a position of focus, entrepreneurs develop the deep knowledge that becomes their marketplace advantage.

Entrepreneurial focus directs research and knowledge gathering. In Jordan’s case, he gathered academic research, medical literature, and clinical studies, and he talked with medical practitioners about cannabinoid therapies. Networking brought him into contact with researchers and doctors and clinicians and product developers. He established a uniquely robust knowledge platform.

Focus plus knowledge leads to opportunity tension.

Some entrepreneurial theorists have coined the term opportunity tension — that period when an entrepreneur’s focus and knowledge point to a market opportunity, but there remains unresolved risk in the process of seizing it. The entrepreneurial solution, of course, is to take the risk. Jordan executed his commitment by taking a job in the retail sector of his chosen industry — a place to meet customers one-on-one, and look backwards at the supply chain.

Customer orientation is refined by direct contact, conversation, and experience.

Working in retail enabled direct customer contact and unfiltered conversations about customers’ preferences and wants, the benefits they sought compared to the benefits they experienced, and a general deepening of customer knowledge.

In addition, Jordan was able to observe the supply chain, including the interruptions and inconsistencies that detracted from customers’ experiences. Product quality was inconsistent and supply was unreliable. To an entrepreneur, this looks like opportunity.

Knowledge, experience, and customer contact provided the ingredient for a new firm and a new value proposition.

Jordan sums up the firm he founded, Moxie, as knowledge + infrastructure. A status quo of incomplete knowledge, inferior and inconsistent products in unreliable supply chains can be replaced by a new market of shared and distilled knowledge delivered via consistent and trustworthy quality. Customers are able to develop trust and confidence in a brand based on knowledge (“we know what we are doing”) that brings new maturity in the form of scale and process control and quality assurance to an emerging market category.

The company’s knowledge base enables vertical integration because the knowledge is broad and not narrow, the recruitment of strong partners because shared knowledge makes for robust collaboration, and new standards of quality, adherence to which strengthens customer expectations.

The firm’s foundation supports both R&D and open innovation.

All markets are changing at high rates of speed at all times. That’s why innovation is the essence of entrepreneurship. Standing still is a losing option. Jordan invests I R&D in the form of lab research (in pharmaceutical quality labs) exploring new product forms and new combinations, while also participating in the open innovation of knowledge sharing that goes on throughout the industry. R&D supports both specialization (making current offerings even better) and market expansion (new products, new forms).

Brand building will be the patient route to long term growth.

While business environments change fast, one way to invest with patience in a consistent direction is to build a brand. A brand can reflect customer values — the things that matter to them — in a way that creates lasting bonds. On its website, Moxie positions its brand as a force of character: courage, grit, determination, nerve. It provides an emotional connection to customers who value self-realization and self-actualization.

Patient entrepreneurs can see the regulatory maze as a locus of opportunity, too.

Moxie was the first licensed cannabis brand in California, and sees itself as a pioneer in leading institutional and regulatory progress. Instead of viewing regulators as business obstacles, Jordan employs his empathy skills to understand their position, their role, and their needs. He provides them with resources of information, industry knowledge and collaboration, and contributes where he can and where it’s appropriate to help them arrive at decisions and translate them into subsequent implementations.

As in building a company and building a brand, patience can pay off in future strength.

Additional Resources

EnjoyMoxie.com

Jordan Lams on LinkedIn: Mises.org/E4B_188_LinkedIn

The Long Night Of Mathematicized Economics Is Over.

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Sometime in the 19th century, economists got the idea that mathematics was an appropriate language for economics. This was a strange turn, since economics is the science of how human beings, pursuing their own desires and preferences, find ways to exchange with other human beings to produce prosperity. Finding ways to exchange involves creativity, ideation, innovation, forming companies, providing services, importing and exporting – activities and processes that don’t lend themselves to algebraic symbols and mathematical equations. 

Mathematics is inappropriate for economics, yet it has become dominant. Why? Precisely because it removed the human component, the creativity, the subjectivism. The new practitioners didn’t want that mode. They wanted cold, hard calculation. They wanted to be seen as “real scientists”, like physicists and engineers, dealing in scientific precision and not the uncertainty and softness that, in their view, characterized the analytics of social science and social interaction. Human-ness is so messy. Math is clean and sterile.

But the hold of mathematics on economics is breaking. Its inappropriateness as a tool of economic understanding is widely recognized, and new alternatives are becoming well established.

The Illusion Of Knowledge

In an essay entitled The Illusion Of Knowledge, Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, points out that the mathematical models of economics can’t predict and can’t guide expectations. There are too many variables and the most important variables are human and therefore unpredictable in their reaction to changing circumstances. He asks

Can a model replicate reality? Can it describe the millions of participants and their interactions? Are the processes it pretends to model dependable? Can the processes be reduced to mathematics? Can mathematics capture the qualitative nuances of people and their behavior? Can a model anticipate changes in consumer preferences, changes in the behavior of business, and participants’ reaction to innovation? In other words, can we trust his output?

Howard Marks, The Illusion Of Knowledge

His answer is no. 

Economics Of Verbs Not Nouns

W. Brian Arthur is another prestigious economist who rejects mathematical modeling for his science. In a paper entitled Economics In Nouns And Verbs, he observes:

The economy is very much a creation of humans and a very complicated one, so given the liberty of human choices and the vagaries of people’s actions, it is not obvious why algebraic logic and calculus should apply.

W. Brian Arthur Economics In Nouns And Verbs.

The core problem, as he articulates it, is that the algebraic symbols of econometric models exclusively represent nouns:

Economics deals with prices, quantities produced, consumption, rates of interest, rates of exchange, rates of inflation, unemployment levels, trade surpluses, GDP, financial assets, Gini coefficients. These are all nouns. In fact, they are all quantifiable nouns— amounts of things, levels of things, rates of things. Economics as it is formally expressed is about amounts and levels and rates, and little else.

Ibid.

The language of mathematics does not allow actions. It can’t answer questions about how an economy or a firm or a development project emerges in the first place, how innovation works, how economic development takes place, or how structural change happens. Anything in the economy that deals with adjustment— whether it is adaptation, innovation, structural change, or history itself—falls through the algebraic mathematics sieve.

Arthur calls for a language of expression in economics that can describe these actions, changes, and innovations, and thereby develop some resemblance to and understanding of the real world.

Language and Austrian economics

Ahmed Elsamadisi, CEO of the analytical software company narrator.ai says that there is one data model that can cope with all these variables: it’s called language. Data has a role to play, but it’s subsidiary to language. Elsamadisi talks about “having a conversation with data” – it’s human beings using language to ask the right questions who are able to find the most value in historical information.

The economics that Brian Arthur is looking for already exists, but most economists ignore it. The unfortunately-named Austrian economics – its first scholars were in Vienna but the research now is global – uses language and deductive logic from first principles to develop its theories. It has no models. 

As economist Per Bylund writes in How To Think About the Economy, economics Is about people and specifically about what they do to meet their own goals. People’s wants are unlimited but their means are not, so they economize, choosing from scarce means to achieve as much as they can. Economics is life: spontaneously and adaptively doing what we can with the resources available to us. As a consequence, the economy Is unplanned order, always in flux. It can’t be modeled.

Subjective Quantification

Professors Peter Lewin and Nicolas Cachanosky propose a novel combination of thought processes to integrate words and numbers in economic calculation. Their term is subjective quantification. Human beings have the unique ability to turn subjective ideas into numbers that express the idea. We find a particular product or service that we feel has potential value to us, and we turn that feeling into a number via our willingness to pay a monetary price to acquire it. That’s turning the subjective – our idea of value – into the objective – the number of dollars we’re willing to pay. Generally, this is the process of economic calculation. Firms estimate revenues they may receive in the future from customers who perform this value calculus. The firm uses its own estimate – a subjective one, by definition – to make plans for investment and business expenditures.

Models promise prediction and guidance on economic variables. It’s an illusion, as Howard Marks puts it.

With the new resurgence of Austrian economics, and its modern expression in what Brian Arthur calls complexity economics (an economics of verbs not nouns), the dominance of mathematics in economics is coming to an end.

187. Per Bylund: The Austrian School Approach to Business versus the Business School Approach

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Business is a form of applied economics. Its purpose is to make people’s lives better. Profit is the signal from society that business is doing a good job in the customer’s estimation. This is a completely human system, a form of human action and interaction. Business schools take the approach of mainstream economics, that mathematics is the tool of choice, expressed in data analytics, accounting, financialization, and numbers-based plans and strategies. The Austrian school approach offers a very different path. Professor Per Bylund joins the Economics For Business podcast to highlight some important differences.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Business logic based on understanding subjective value.

The purpose of business to facilitate customer value. The pursuit of new economic value brings new firms into existence, the continuing realization of new value experiences for customers results in business growth, and recurrent refreshment of value propositions keeps businesses thriving and healthy.

Consequently, value is fundamental to business. Yet it is widely misunderstood. Sometimes it’s misconstrued as shareholder value, a function of stock price performance. Usually, it’s financialized as a set of numbers and indexes.

True value is in the mind of the customer. It’s the experience of feeling better off as result of interacting with a business — making a purchase, taking a subscription, or using a service that makes life feel better, and that feels like a superior choice compared to alternatives.

Customers decide what to value, and therefore what to purchase, and thereby decide the success of a business. All businesses must learn this value logic, and Austrian economics for business provides the understanding that points to the implications for business action.

Thinking in subjective terms.

An understanding of subjective value reverses the flow of business thinking. It’s easy and conventional to think in objective terms about products and prices — what a firm produces and offers and the price the firm charges. It’s harder and somewhat counter-intuitive for businesses to think about how each individual customer feels — what’s important to them, individually and personally, about the unique ecosystem in which they make their choices (e.g., their family profile, what kind of a house they live in, or the subjective resource allocation priorities of each of the individual firm they work for).

The customer decides what is valuable to them, and that’s the basis from which business action must proceed.

Value-guided creativity.

Business is a creative discipline. Because customer preferences and priorities are continuously changing, because competition is continuously aiming at making a superior customer proposition, because technology is continuously making new benefits and new customer experiences possible, and because we can’t possibly know how all this will work out in the future, businesses must always be changing, improving, adding, renewing, becoming somehow better in the future than they are today.

The only way to invent the future in this way is through creativity — new ideas, new combinations, new routes to convenience, new removal of barriers. Creativity can be random and unpredictable — we don’t know what is going to be successful out of all our creative ideas. Therefore, we apply constraints so that creativity operates within productive boundaries, and the generative constraint is customer value. If all our creative ideas are guided by the constraint of “will the customer find this more valuable”, then the opportunity for productive innovation is greater. If we place ourselves in the shoes of customers, and try to simulate what they will feel when they experience a new value proposition, we’re on the track to business success. This is value-guided creativity.

Business as a flow.

Business schools emphasize planning and strategy (and strategies are often just long-term, bigger plans). These are tools of prediction and control — predict the future (we will achieve $10 million in annual revenue this year) and control how we get there (100 salespeople must sell $100,000 each). The numbers can fill a spreadsheet.

Similarly with organization design: the spreadsheet in this case is an org chart, with layers and reporting pathways and divisions and units, another exercise in statics.

The Austrian recognition of constant change results in re-thinking business as a flow. Thinking in statics is potentially disastrous because the world can change while your firm does not. Thinking dynamically opens the firm to feedback loops from the marketplace, listening to customers and monitoring when their preferences change or competition shifts, and being open to adapting and adjusting.

Organization design gives way to orchestration, the constantly changing arrangements dedicated to the improvement of the customer’s value experience.

Every business can and must act entrepreneurially.

Our term for the orientation towards and capacity for constant change — constant pursuit of new customer value — is entrepreneurship.

In the popular vernacular, the word entrepreneurship has come to be associated with charismatic individuals, like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Reed Hastings. They are identified as the instigators of and catalysts for new value generation. That’s fine — such individuals are important in challenging the status quo. But for effective and commercial and sustainable new value generation, the entire firm must be entrepreneurial — highly sensitive to how a particular configuration of resources and a particular business model and value proposition serves customers, and to changes in the business environment that require adjustment on the firm’s part. The firm must be flexible enough to make these adjustments. Often, the market data comes to the firm from the edge, where front line employees working directly with customers gather the inbound information about change. The entrepreneurial firm ensures that the new information flows freely and is acted upon, and gives those closest to the customer the authority to make responsive changes.

Business schools often teach static and defensive concepts such as economies of scale and competitively insulated market structures. Business for them is production management. Business from the Austrian school perspective is value discovery, value facilitation and responsive change in the form of new products, new services, and new value.

Entrepreneurial empathy as a tool.

When we think of business tools highlighted in business schools, we might think of strategic planning, data analytics, accounting, process management, incentive compensation, and financialization.

The tool of choice for the entrepreneurial firm is empathy. Empathy is customer-first thinking. It focuses on identifying and understanding what customers feel is missing in their life, what they long for and wish for. There’s a gap between customers’ actual experiences and their desired experiences. They can’t articulate solutions, but they’re brilliant at identifying the potential for improvement. If the customer feels that some experiences could be better, or that they’re struggling in some capacity with an experience, that’s a signal for the creative entrepreneurial firm to experiment with new ways to deliver that betterment.

Entrepreneurial firms create better futures for their customers via empathy. They bring customers new things that they can want, that weren’t available to them in the past or of which they were not aware.

It’s not all numbers.

Just as mainstream economics has been rendered irrelevant and meaningless to real people because of its insistence on the use of algebra and mathematical models instead of real world observations, so mainstream business schools have made business into a world of spreadsheets, accounting, data analysis, bar charts and graphs, and structures and formulas.

Austrian school business thinkers understand the role of qualitative assessment — understanding people as humans as opposed to statistics, understanding emergent processes, understanding feelings and subjective value, and that the things that matter to people, both employees and customers, are values not numbers.

That’s why narrative and sense-making stories are taking the place of plans and strategies. Software development provides a good example: user experience design is a narrative about how customers prefer to interact with the software they are using, rather than a focus on lines of code.

Action and feedback loops.

The ultimate replacement for business school concepts of planning and strategy is action. Entrepreneurship is action. Action generates an effect — a feedback loop from the marketplace that signals the result of the action. The customer purchased or did not purchase. The rating improved or worsened. Revenue grew or declined. In the A/B test, B was preferred.

The feedback loop is processed as learning, and new decisions can be made and new actions taken based on that learning, eliminating some possibilities, and opening up others. Innovation is introduced to the market and new learning follows new innovation in a continuous loop.

In the thinking of entrepreneurial action, acting faster and sooner is better, because the effect is generated faster, the feedback loop accelerates, and the resulting new action is fresher and and more responsive to the customer’s needs. When action is bolder and more daring, the feedback loop is more informative and clearer in its signals. The future unfolds as a result of entrepreneurial action.

Entrepreneurs don’t act alone or in isolation. The unfolding of the future is the consequence of many actions on the part of many people and firms. The market, therefore, is a process. Action and reaction keep it moving in unpredictable ways — resulting in what complexity theorists call emergence.

The Austrian School is a complete system for business.

We didn’t have sufficient time with Professor Bylund in the podcast format to cover the complete range of business functions, including marketing and accounting and business model design, but these are all improved and enhanced by what we can call the Austrian approach. The goal of Economics For Business is to deliver this complete system in the form of tools, posts, articles, papers, books, videos, and podcasts like this one.

Additional Resources

Austrian School Versus Business School: A side-by-side comparison (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_187_PDF

How To Think About The Economy: A Primer by Per Bylund: Mises.org/Primer 

186. Jared Wall: How a Courageous Entrepreneur Enters a Formative Market

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How do new markets form? When consumers change their tastes and preferences and behaviors, how are the markets to serve them activated? The markets don’t yet exist — entrepreneurial action is required to create them. The answer to the question, of course, is that entrepreneurs — real people taking the real business risk to initiate new business experiments — provide the new energy and new initiative to create markets where previously they didn’t exist.

Jared Wall is one of these creative entrepreneurs, and thchempspot.com is his creation.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

Courageous entrepreneurs lead the way into new markets as they are still forming.

Entrepreneurs bring the energy that opens new markets and new pathways to economic value. New markets can emerge as the result of changing consumer tastes and preferences, new channels or platforms, new forms of delivery, new technologies or a combination of several catalysts — but the energy, initiative and drive of the entrepreneur is always the necessary ingredient for the ultimate emergence of new value and new market arrangements.

New discoveries and new innovations often provide the entrepreneur with market-opening mechanisms.

Serving customers in new and different ways doesn’t always require new products and services, but it is often the case that the discovery or invention of novel combinations can lead to innovation — that is, new and better experiences for customers that were previously unknown or unavailable or narrowly distributed. In the market for consumable cannabis products, there emerged a new THC variant called Delta 8 THC, a cannabinoid that offered both different product performance and different accessibility. The emergent new ingredient provided the pathway to a whole new market opportunity.

Legislation and regulation are complications and barriers in formative markets, but often their ambiguity provides an opening for innovative entry.

The courageous entrepreneurs who lead the way into formative markets often encounter legislative and regulatory barriers, since these are static drags on progress and innovation and never keep up with the changes in markets. At the same time, the regulatory thicket can sometimes be useful to the entrepreneur who can cut a new opening others can’t imagine.

In the market for consumable cannabis products, Delta 8 THC became such a new opening, which was cut when some content in a comprehensive congressional Farm Bill encouraged the commercialization of certain kinds of hemp, of which Delta 8 THC was one of the by-products. Legislators and policy authors can’t think about the future the way entrepreneurs can, and they did not envision the future world of innovation they were unlocking.

The regulatory maze is an aspect of legislation and regulation — but every maze has an exit path.

Innovation in formative markets combines and compounds.

Jared Wall launched thchempspot.com to offer Delta 8 THC experiences to consumers. Those who shop at the site find a lot more innovation than just this ingredient. There are multiple new consumable forms for varied experience delivery — gummies, chocolate bars, chewing gum, soft gels, and peanut brittle, among others.

Where do these innovations come from? Not from the R&D labs of major corporations, that’s for certain. They originate in the creative minds of imaginative entrepreneurs, and they take shape in their experiments and prototypes and willingness to try new things. Will they all be big successes? Of course not. But they will all generate feedback loops of acceptance or non-acceptance, reviews and ratings and experience sharing; they’ll contribute to innovation as an ongoing cycle of learning. Society enjoys better choices because entrepreneurs unleash their creativity and don’t hold back from experimental designs.

Market infrastructure and market institutions can’t always keep up with entrepreneurial change, but new supportive services quickly appear to lubricate frictions and provide institutional arbitrage.

All commerce needs infrastructure such as payment systems and institutions such as banks, and market formation can sometimes move faster than infrastructure and institutions can adapt. Jared Wall had this experience — PayPal and major banks cut off services because thchempsot.com, while serving legitimate customers with legal products, was deemed a “high risk” business, outside their terms and conditions.

Yet, in a quite inspirational way, business services emerge in these situations to navigate around the barriers of poorly adapted institutions. Jared found consultants who offer the service of connecting so-called “high risk” businesses with value-network partners willing to collaborate with them. Jared was quickly able to replace his payment system and banking infrastructure. There was a service interruption, but it was temporary. A new network of mediating services quickly formed to bypass institutional barriers.

The creation and sharing of new information is a big part of the innovation equation.

Jesus Huerta De Soto1 identifies the creation and sharing of new information as the central activity of entrepreneurs – informing customers of new products and services and new offerings and prices. Entrepreneurs are constantly creating, updating, and improving the information resources they make available to customers. High quality information enhances value.

On thchempspot.com, Jared provides information in Q&A form, pull-down menus, and product descriptions. He’s self-published an informative e-book that’s free on the site, and he publishes an informative newsletter. We can sometimes feel unclear about the value of information, but in formative markets its importance is primary not secondary.