Posts

161. Connie Whitman: Turning Experience Into An Intellectual Property Business

/0 Comments/in /by

Your individual experience is a business asset. Life is teaching us more than we sometimes realize. An insightful analysis of what we’ve experienced, combined with purposeful translation, can generate unique intellectual property on which to base a unique approach to business. Connie Whitman joins Economics For Business to share her experience and her development of a thriving, resilient, and adaptive coaching and training service.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Experience is an asset that reveals our business superpowers.

Life teaches us whether we fully realize it or not. While climbing the job ladder at a firm may seem like the pursuit of credentials and titles, it’s better understood as an accumulation of knowledge and learning that can be applied in the future in entrepreneurship.

Connie Whitman enjoyed a 20-year career in financial services up to the SVP level. It was her customers who pointed out to her what “superpowers” she was developing — a distinctive capacity to assist all parties in a complex collaborative contract to fully understand the benefits accruing to each one of them individually and all of them collectively.

We all can have these superpowers, but we don’t always realize them until a third party points them out, through asking for input or advice or seeking us out or praising us. It’s important to learn the right kind of self-assessment — and to learn to listen to others’ assessment of us — so as to be able to understand our own superpowers.

We can translate our experience into intellectual property that forms the basis for an entrepreneurial business.

Connie Whitman transformed her experience into both a brand philosophy and a scalable methodology.

Connie knew from her experience in business that the function entitled “sales” is often viewed negatively: sales activities and salespeople might be accused of rapaciousness and avarice, however unjustified such accusations may be. She intended to develop a service in coaching and training in the sales field, and so it was important to distance herself from these misperceptions. Her counter was selling from a place of love: relationship selling based on love, respect, and integrity. Selling is the construction of an “everybody wins” proposition. It’s an honorable implementation of the entrepreneur’s ethic of service. Anyone using Connie’s techniques would evoke for themselves a feeling of pride and self-respect that the critics of the sales function try to deny.

She crafted a methodology for selling from a place of love in the form of a seven-step selling process. It is replete with Austrian principles of subjectiveness, empathy, and customer sovereignty.

Preparedness: Planning in advance to assemble all the knowledge and understanding available to make you informed and ready; anticipating what the customer will want to know and is likely to ask.

Connecting: Using empathy to connect on the basis of what’s important to the customer in order to establish credibility.

Exploring: Asking questions to learn as much as possible about the customer’s needs and preferences in the context of their current circumstances.

Active Listening: Connie’s phrase is “be present” — listen intently and indicate that you have heard accurately by asking follow up questions to further explore customer needs.

Presenting Solutions: Framing all value propositions as a solution — reliving customer unease.

Confirming: The process of closing the sale, actively asking the customer for their business.

Following up: Consistent, persistent, and respectful (CPR) follow up to confirm satisfaction and potentially extend the relationship.

Connie’s method has evolved and improved over the years — nothing is ever fixed, and all businesses adapt and learn. Yet this intellectual property developed from experience has proven to be solid capital generating both revenue flows and client satisfaction, not to mention word-of-mouth recommendations and references.

Business-building is a function of your network — another piece of intellectual property born of experience.

You meet many people in your professional career and you make many connections. Your network is another IP asset. It’s one you should groom and keep fresh and active, turning it into another business asset.

An IP business can be lasting, but you may have to refresh the infrastructure.

Connie’s in-person, face-to-face business model was challenged during the COVID pandemic. When business travel stopped, and a lot of sales training budgets were cut. The IP remained valid. The market signal was for her to digitize the business. She took classes and hired consultants to learn how to achieve domain authority. She educated herself on the technology required for digitization of her individual business model, and the processes for digital engagement that were consistent with her 7-step process and principles. The result has been further growth, and the continued fulfillment of pursuing her business goals, and realizing new ones.

Your entrepreneurial IP business can become your most fulfilling experience.

Connie describes her entrepreneurial experience as immensely fulfilling — the most rewarding thing she has done in her life. It’s the realization of the value accumulated over a career, and the new value shared with clients in providing service to them. It has been tremendously hard work, of course, and has required some challenging resource allocation decisions — of both time and money — but the reward greatly exceeds the sacrifice.

Additional Resources

“Connie Whitman’s Seven-Step Sales Loop” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_161_PDF

ESP—Easy Sales Process by Connie Whitman: Mises.org/E4B_161_Book

Connie’s website: WhitmanAssoc.com

Changing The Sales Game podcast: Mises.org/E4B_161_Pod

158. Mark Romera’s Globally Orchestrated Entrepreneurial Design Journey

/0 Comments/in /by

Entrepreneurship-as-design is brought to life in a wonderful conversation with Mark Romera, who conceived, designed and brought to market a values-driven vision of kids having fun playing in their backyards, via an impeccably crafted brand named Spimbey.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

Entrepreneurs can identify innovation opportunities even in the most established fundamental routines of everyday family life.

What’s more basic than kids playing with physical toys in the family back yard, running round, having fun, connecting with others? It’s fundamental to family life in the neighborhood. Yet, kids don’t get that experience so much these days. How to bring it back? That’s an entrepreneurial question that Mark Romera answered with Spimbey, a brand new playset product he designed and launched though his company, Spimba.

First, choose your customer.

Mark chose Mom. Kids are users, but Mom’s the customer. She’s part of a family with target-age kids and some backyard space. She wants her kids to have fun, play safely outside, play with others, and develop themselves physically and mentally. She worries about how much time kids spend on their digital screens, and how that affects their development.

How does an entrepreneur develop the requisite deep knowledge about Mom? Talk to her; engage her in conversation. Go where the play takes place — the back yard.

Distill a complex need into a simple solution.

Already, there’s a lot of complexity. Mom, kids, families, playthings and the materials they’re made with. This brings in safety considerations and regulations, as well as design and manufacturing needs and marketing and distribution needs. The best way to get started is work backwards from the simple solution — the concept of a finished playset, easily assembled by Mom or Dad in a suburban backyard. It needs to be simple for Mom to understand and picture in her mind, and all her questions (like safety and ease of assembly and sustainability) must have simple answers.

From this simple vision, entrepreneurs work backwards in a disassembly process to identify everything they’ll need and the network design to bring it all together.

Design and assemble a flexibly networked internal and external team.

Mark was a sole founder. First, he assembled his team in answer to the questions, who can help me with this journey? He also had flexibility for when and where he needed team members. For the “internal” team (not necessarily employees but performing functional management roles) he looked for process development, product development, brand development and web development. He made careful decisions about types of people, level of experience and the ability to take responsibility in an agile process. Most important was brand alignment — a premium, high quality, high integrity brand presentation requires team members of an appropriate caliber who understand reputation building and high consumer trust.

Next, he focused on assembling the external support team: design, safety experts, materials experts, testing labs and safety certifiers aligned with the appropriate regulatory regimes, manufacturing partners, external sales and customer service experts, logistics, freight and delivery partners. The entire value network must be linked, and scheduled for the right inputs at the right time, all working backwards in the calendar from the critical date, which is the high season for retail sales of playsets. Co-ordination of value network nodes and information flows with process inputs, sequences and handoffs is a complex exercise which must be programmed before any work commences.

The design process is a combination of creativity, rigor, networking and collaborative integration.

As we’ve learned, much of entrepreneurship is a design process, to get from a concept that’s generated internally to a completed product or project that can meet the rigorous demands of the external world, including Mom and the safety regulators, and the guardians of the distribution channels.

The design concept must take a form that everyone involved in the design process can see and understand in an appropriate way, without contradictions or misunderstandings. Then the appropriate design parameters must be assigned: safety, durability, ease of assembly and ease of use, manufacturability, regulatory compliance, freight and packaging constraints. Many of these design inputs must be outsourced — to computer design shops, materials specialists, manufacturers who can impose their own restrictions, warehousers and freight carriers who have specific requirements.

There is a lot of iteration, adjustment, change management and process orchestration to be managed as the design concept advances towards the market and becomes more and more solid, complete and comprehensively detailed. Mark emphasizes meticulous planning, and a calm demeanor with clear communications to keep the network aligned and on the same page.

Branding is a critical element.

The product is physical, but the benefits are psychological. This includes the sense of fun and easiness for the kids, and the feeling of satisfaction and safety for parents. These psychic benefits must be captured in the brand presentation, both online and in physical elements like design and color and packaging. For Mark, his brand is his philosophy, captured in communication, presentation, design, production and delivery.

Mark Romera’s personal entrepreneurial journey passed through various business roles and experiences before branching into entrepreneurship.

Mark worked in growth marketing, business intelligence, new business development and as an independent consultant solving strategic problems for business clients. As his responsibilities increased, he often felt like an entrepreneur inside the corporation. In growth marketing, he learned the power of testing supported by data. Test everything, without waiting for too much discussion about the pros and cons of an idea or concept. If it works, scale it up, if it doesn’t, try to understand why based on the data you’ve collected. Testing and experimentation produce data, and data reduces uncertainty. The data cycle requires speed for success, and not conventional structures or decision-making processes that slow things down.

Entrepreneurship brings unique psychic rewards.

With his growth hacking and exploit-and-expand experience, Mark felt ready and eager to step into entrepreneurship. He told us he wanted something more, because something was missing. He wanted the freedom to develop his own ideas from scratch and to create something new and cool. The psychic reward from entrepreneurship is special. It combines the challenge of immediate implementation and a successful sales season with the long term vision of building a global brand, extending a product line, and gaining acceptance in markets worldwide.

The entrepreneurial journey for Mark is immediately highly rewarding with the long term prospect of increasing achievement and success.

Additional Resources

Mark Romera’s “Entrepreneurial Journey as a Design Process” (PDF): Download Now

See the completion of the journey: Spimbey.com

152. Laura and Derek Cabrera: Building An Entrepreneurial Business Culture With Systems Thinking

/0 Comments/in /by

Why do entrepreneurs start businesses in the first place? They have a vision for the future and seek to work with other people to bring it about. Those other people may be colleagues and employees, directors and investors, suppliers, and customers. Organizing this multivalent work is hard. Thinking of your organization as a complex adaptive system yields new understanding and a new approach to organizing that results in improved goal achievement.

Laura and Derek Cabrera of Cabrera Research Lab are dedicated to sharing research findings that enhance the capability of any organization to reach business goals. They join the Economics For Business podcast to do some sharing with the E4B community.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Systems Thinking resolves the mismatch between the way the real world works and the way firms think it works.

World hunger is a wicked problem, yet there is enough food to feed the world. We don’t have the right mental model to account for all the social, economic, political, motivational, and cultural issues that shape the problem.

In the same vein, systems thinking in business is about building mental models that better align with the real world. Laura and Derek Cabrera provide an introduction in Systems Thinking Made Simple, and they mentioned some of the important changes in thinking that businesses must embrace to enter the new world of possibilities that systems thinking opens up. The first step is to recognize that LAMO thinking is inappropriate for a VUCA world.

The real world is agnostic about human endeavors

VUCA WorldLAMO Thinking
The real world is non-linearbut we think in linear ways.
yet we tend to look sat things through a human-centered (anthropocentric) lens.yet we tend to look sat things through a human-centered (anthropocentric) lens.
The real world is adaptive and organicyet we tend to think mechanistically and the metaphors we use reference machines (e.g., a universe like clockwork; mind is a computer).
The real world is networked and complex with a sprinkling of randomnessyet we think of things in ordered categories and hierarchies.

All businesses are complex adaptive systems. We have no choice in the matter. An organization is a living, breathing thing, organic — lots of individuals dynamically making decisions that roll up into the complex system. It’s not a machine.

An implication is that business executives and managers can’t operate on outcomes directly (e.g., via business “planning” or business “strategy”). Outcomes are emergent from the system and can be worked on only indirectly.

The traditional mental model for business organization is flawed.

Laura and Derek capture the traditional mental model for organizational management in the acronym PCCU: Plan, Command, Control, Utilize.

Plan: Businesses create plans for the future, often in great detail, with rigorous discipline, and lots of numbers and projections. But the real world is changing too fast, and outlining detailed steps to reach a goal amidst rapid change introduces biases that can occlude opportunities for rapid and profitable adaptation to change.

Command: Hierarchical organization designs assume a military metaphor of command. Organizations are much more organic in the real world, tempered by social influence, compliance, resistance, and rebellion. Better to think of then organization as a network and a culture.

Control: Management likes to feel like it is in control, but the control paradigm is both unrealistic and unresponsive to organic change.

Utilize: The most detrimental organizational construct is the Human Resources department. Treating people like resources to be utilized is unsustainable. People are independent agents in the system who wish to co-evolve to a place where their individual goals and those of the organization are well-aligned.

The mental model for how complex adaptive systems work is Simple Rules.

The great insight from complex adaptive systems thinking is that organizational behavior isn’t directed by leaders, but driven by followers. What are they following? Simple rules.

We can think of an organization as a superorganism. It self-organizes by following simple rules that guide the actions of individual agents in variable contexts. Autonomous agents follow simple rules based on what’s happening locally (that is, around them), the collective dynamics of which lead to the emergence of the complex, system-level behavior we observe: adaptiveness and robustness.

The simple rules for successful adaptive organizations are summed up as V-M-C-L.

Vision: A seeing thing. Something we all see in the future, where we are headed. Not a tagline, not a statement on a website, not a corporate word salad. A vision is a shared mental model that everyone in the organization can see and articulate and align with. It’s in their hearts and minds. It gets employees excited and connected.

Mission: A doing thing. A mission is something that you do repeatedly over and over again to bring about the vision. It directs the work in the organization, with clarity about who does what. It’s clear, concise, easily understood and measurable.

Capacity: The organization must have the capacity to do the mission: the energy, the resources, the skills. Capacity is a system of systems all connected and working together, focused on, and directed towards doing the mission.

Learning: Learning is critical to expand capacity, reinforce mission and refine vision. It is the adaptive function. Organizations must love learning – seeking unvarnished feedback from the outside world as input into making the changes that are needed for improvement. This means loving reality and being brutally honest about the current state. Learning means improving mental models, and embracing the possibility that your current model is wrong.

In their book Flock Not Clock (see Mises.org/E4B_152_Book), where there is a detailed exposition and explanation of V-M-C-L, Laura and Derek cite the example of the app My Fitness Pal.

Vision: Healthy living is the new normal

Mission: Facilitate and motivate healthy behavior choices

Capacity: Build mission-critical systems: design, engineering, R&D, sales, and marketing, etc.

Learning: Feedback on whether living healthy is getting easier, whether more people are making healthy choices, whether more people are feeling joyful and powerful as a result.

Think of the elements of V-M-C-L as a pyramid you can construct from first principles: Thinking drives Learning, which drives Capacity, which drives Mission, which brings about Vision.

The emergent result of V-M-C-L is culture.

Laura and Derek talk about training people to think in order to be able to learn. The first step is often unlearning the misleading mental models we’ve been taught to believe. When people start to think about mental models, they can recognize their own and those of others, and make comparisons, make changes, and find common ground.

If your mental model about your current situation is real — “brutally honest,” as Derek put it — then the chance of changing that situation for the better is good. You’ll be able to identify a path out.

Culture can be built around the simple rules of vision, mission, capacity, and learning, by purposely constructing the four mental models of V-M-C-L. There is enormous organizational and economic power in the new understanding of complex adaptive systems and how they work in getting a group of disparate people to work together towards a goal as if they are a single unified organism.

Additional Resources

Sign up for Laura and Derek’s Vision-Mission Bootcamp:  Go.CabreraResearch.org/VMBootcamp

Visit Cabrera Research Lab online at CabreraResearch.org and on LinkedIn (Mises.org/E4B_152_LinkedIn).

“20-Point V-M-C-L Checklist” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_152_PDF1

“Constructing the VMCL System” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_152_PDF2

Flock Not Clock: Align People, Processes and Systems to Achieve Your Vision by Derek and Laura Cabrera: Mises.org/E4B_152_Book

149: Victor Chor: The Journey From Flipping to Global High-Tech Brand Building

/0 Comments/in /by

Entrepreneurship is fulfilling and exciting and inspiring. It’s fun. It’s learning. It’s a sense of achievement. It’s a journey. Economics For Business loves to spotlight individual journeys to illustrate what’s possible, provide learning about how to create and grow opportunities, and to inspire new entrepreneurship. This week, we are joined by Victor Chor, who leads us on a journey from a hobby of flipping on eBay to creating a brand and orchestrating a high-energy global value generation community.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

The journey starts with action — develop your “doing skills”.

Victor Chor started his journey via “flipping” on eBay: sourcing items to offer for sale, and using sales feedback (what sells, what doesn’t) to determine future offerings. He developed the “doing skill” (as opposed to a “knowing skill” that comes from formal business education) as he made more and more sales. Flipping was a hobby that became a business.

What’s the benefit? Well, it’s fun. There’s money profit. There’s a sense of achievement. And there’s learning.

Experimentation is at the heart of entrepreneurial success.

How do you find out what works? You experiment. Try this, try that. Learning results. Victor learned the products that sell best. He learned scaling, as a repeatable process yielding increasing returns. He learned the best feedback loops for adaptiveness — in his case inventory management and how to keep it low through accelerated sales.

Experimentation is a learning loop: experiment, gather feedback, learn, improve, run more experiments.

Adopting customer centricity is a further advance on the journey.

To a large extent, Amazon, with its “customer obsession”, led the way in making customer centricity the norm for e-commerce and internet selling. They not only continuously raise the bar for customer service excellence in terms of quality, speed, convenience, availability, and range of choice, they also introduced wide ranging competition between 3rd party sellers on their platform. Competition is a virtuous circle for customer satisfaction: if one firm establishes an advantage or a superior offering to which customers flock, then competitors must improve their offering even more to re-qualify for customer acceptability.

In this environment, entrepreneurs learn about continuous improvement and the need to create a unique customer experience that can establish some sustainable advantage. The ability to grow in sales revenues morphs into the design of unique customer experiences.

A further advance in the mastery of customer centricity is to engage customers in product and service development — what we’ve been calling co-creation of value. Through surveys and e-mail marketing and just hanging out and talking with customers, Victor’s team has developed an acute understanding of customer wants, needs and preferences.

And the technology field lets us all think like customers. Victor points out that he and his team are all customers for the products they take to market. They’re all looking for quality and convenience and technological excellence, all experiencing what inconveniences customers, and therefore even better able to serve their market.

The next level of advance on the journey is brand building — imagining, designing, assembling, and marketing a differentiated branded offering.

There is a transition point where a project can become a brand. A project to develop and deliver a high-function technology product can cross into the branded perception and branded experience area. Branding is the ultimate power in delivering uniqueness. A brand can establish a sustainable and unassailable perception.

Victor Chor advanced into brand building through building his community. The people he hired into his growing business has ideas for establishing and growing a brand. Wholesaling and distribution and manufacturing partners contributed both ideas and capacity. Victor developed a very original concept of a brand as a representation of all the people involved together in the venture. His image for a brand is that “it’s a ballroom”: set it up and throw a party in which many can participate and all are welcome to help shape new products and the future of the brand.

Infinacore is the brand name around which Victor and his team have assembled their community. It’s focused on wireless charging and related high-tech convenience: the brand mission refers to “making the wonderful world we live in as simple as plug and play”. This is a brand platform with unlimited future potential, based on how customers define simplicity and plug-and-play in the future, and how they judge what they find to be wonderful.

Reaching out more and more widely expands opportunity and opens up new avenues.

Early in his journey, Victor utilized the services offered via Alibaba. He made contacts, built up a buddy list, engaged in chat on the platform, and used the network to source products. Many of his contacts in manufacturing and trading companies stayed in touch over time. Some of them started their own venture and their own factories. Long term relationships developed, and links to capability and capacity multiplied and grew stronger.

Everyone in this network is on their own journey, feeling what Victor called the “shared vibe” of connection and collaboration.

Alibaba proved to be a catalyst for learning — for example, learning a shared language, learning to negotiate, learning to communicate, and learning working practices like minimum order quantities — and an opening of new avenues, such as contacts with factories that could provide white labeling opportunities and technology improvements for original products.

Ultimately, Victor was able to develop a leadership skill in entrepreneurial orchestration: pulling together and integrating resources, people and processes in a value network dedicated to the shared pursuit of high-tech brand building.

The journey is arriving at a new peak, but never ends.

There’s a new product / wireless charging system launch coming up for Infinacore. It represents a new peak in both technology and brand, a unique original design with new benefits. The Infinacore community has advanced to a new higher level.

The company has refined its vision and mission, not simply as communication, but as a picture of the future around which everyone in the community can gather and in which all can invest their effort and emotional energy. It’s ingrained. There‘s shared passion and shared emotion.

This is the step that removes the anxiety of uncertainty. When the vision is shared and the mission — what the community does repeatedly every day to make progress towards the vision — is clear, then the future is not a scary unknown, but a goal towards which there is continuous advance. There’s no fear.

Additional Resources

“The Evolution Of A Global High-Tech Brand” (PDF): Download PDF

Visit Infinacore.com

Follow Infinacore on Instagram: @Infinacore

132. Saifedean Ammous on Knowledge Entrepreneurship

/2 Comments/in /by

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

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

/0 Comments/in /by

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