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Six Superior Characteristics Of The Entrepreneurial Society.

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We live in a political society. Politicians and the bureaucrats whom they enable hold all the power. Most people despise them.

Why? Because of their role. They exist to argue over the division of the economic pie that others produce. Politicians despise production and elevate themselves over producers. The fact that they behave badly in the performance of their role merely exacerbates the disdain in which they are held; it is not the primary cause.

The producer role is played by entrepreneurs. That’s the economic term for those who monitor what politicians call (but never truly examine) the will of the people: what people want, what they need, what they prefer, how they feel, what pleases them, and what disappoints them. Entrepreneurs gather this information by listening. They process it through their empathy – the skill of imagining what it’s like to feel what others feel – and decide whether there is a business’s opportunity there. That depends on many variables – the intensity of the need, its durability (how long will it last if unfulfilled), the viability of assembling resources and a business plan to produce a good or a service to meet the need, the likelihood of people buying the solution from one entrepreneur versus another.

Collaboration.

There are important human values at work here. There’s collaboration. People need entrepreneurs to find new ways to solve their problems or meet their needs. Entrepreneurs need customers to channel the market rewards they seek to keep their production going. This symbiosis is the essence of the market system, raising everyone’s boat through the collaboration of buying and selling.

Shared emotion.

There’s the animating emotion of wanting. Human beings act in a conscious way to improve their circumstances. They want something better than what they experience in the present. This is the energy that drives civilization all progress. Consumers want need fulfillment. Entrepreneurs want to feel the fulfillment of acting as the solution source. This is how mutual wants come into alignment in society. 

Listening.

There is listening. There is none of that in politics of course. Yet it’s the core informational input into the entrepreneurial process. The first question in that process is, “What do I know?” Entrepreneurs need continuously updated information about the market, about trends, about preferences, about available options, about pricing, about competitors, and about a thousand other things. They get it through listening. It’s a humble mindset – not dictating or declaring or asserting, not jumping to conclusions, not arguing or contradicting, not wishful thinking, just listening. 

Empathy.

And there is the core entrepreneurial skill of empathy. How can we understand what others feel they need to make their lives better? We all have consciousness but we are not gifted with experiencing the consciousness of others. To be an entrepreneur, it’s necessary to overcome that cognitive barrier. How? It’s a mental modeling process. Entrepreneurs build a mental model of how others – customers – think and feel. It’s not their own mental model, so humility again comes into play – the humility of trying to understand and appreciate another’s point of view. It’s a kind of self-sacrifice – sacrificing one’s own ego in order to feel the way another person feels. 

Sacrifice.

In fact, sacrifice is fundamental to successful entrepreneurship. It takes mental sacrifice to understand others’ needs. Then it requires the sacrifice of time and resources in production to design, assemble and produce the goods and services which will become the value proposition to the customer. To serve others with economic offers and innovation is an ethic of devoting one’s present to the future satisfaction of customers. It’s for this sacrifice, when successful in the eyes of the customer, that the entrepreneur is rewarded. 

Value.

The result is an ever-increasing pool of value. In entrepreneurial economics, value is the customer experience that transpires when the offer made by the entrepreneur is successful in making the customer feel better. Value is a feeling, a good feeling. Entrepreneurs aim to generate value – only the customer can actually create it via their own experience. The more value the entrepreneur generates, the better the customer experience and the greater the ultimate reward to the entrepreneur. The mutuality is self-reinforcing. The whole society is raised up.

A Better Society.

Imagine what society would be like if it were entrepreneurial and not political. It would be characterized by the values of collaboration, emotional sharing, listening, empathy and sacrifice. It would be productive, because entrepreneurs always figure out how to generate more value with less input and fewer resources. It would be about a growing pie for all rather than a political fight over the division and redistribution of the pie. The entrepreneurial society would be much superior to the political society. Let’s work to create it.

139. Fabrice Testa on Super Entrepreneurship

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Entrepreneurship is a method, and it’s also a mindset. Fabrice Testa has written a book that brilliantly integrates the two: he calls the integration “Super Entrepreneurship,” and his book title is therefore Super Entrepreneurship Decoded. He has the appropriate credentials as a proven super-entrepreneur who has created and nurtured numerous great companies (and successfully sold a couple of them).

Fabrice knows the true meaning of the phrase, “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea”.

Entrepreneurs are animated by their purpose. Super entrepreneurs embrace a massive transformative purpose.

The motivation for entrepreneurs is to help others — to solve problems for others, as we sometimes phrase it. Super entrepreneurs, in Fabrice Testa’s language, are those who choose to dedicate their businesses to solving the biggest problems. By setting big goals, they attract many like-minded partners, collaborators, and employees. By targeting transformation, they aim to change the world in a significant way.

In making this choice, super entrepreneurs are delving deeply into their own personal story to understand their own drivers and their own passionate commitment. There’s a major self-discovery component.

Having set their MTP, super entrepreneurs develop a systematic approach to the pursuit of their goal.

Fabrice Testa recommends that super entrepreneurs combine what he calls CRAZY thinking with a relentless sense of purpose. CRAZY is an acronym for elements of entrepreneurship that Testa calls the Five Secrets. We agreed not to give them away, but they add up to a five-step method entrepreneurs can follow, and a checklist that they can use to assess the market power of their own concepts and business models.

The context for the 5-step method is the exponential rate of growth of available and applicable technologies for entrepreneurship, and the convergence of those technologies that results in a compounding of productivity. When, for example, sensor-based data collection can be combined with A.I. and robotics, whole new fields of automation open up, potentially helping billions of people.

A relentless sense of purpose is a major element in the super entrepreneurial mix.

Super entrepreneurs are highly motivated. They display high levels of ambition and drive, and they generate strong momentum. They seek change, and aim for breakthroughs. They love to set the bar high.

There is a spirit to super entrepreneurship, an intangible spark of super energy and boldness that sets the best entrepreneurs apart and powers them to unusual levels of achievement.

There’s a plan, but it’s not fixed.

Fabrice Testa identifies a master plan for the activities of high-achieving entrepreneurs, but it’s not the restrictive plan of the business school strategist. One term he used was Roadmap: there’s a goal to get from A to B, but it’s OK to visit C, D and E along the way, and to learn and double back and embrace recursive procedures to reach the targeted end-results. The key to success is keeping the goal in mind with flexibility on the route to get there.

Let the customer be the guide.

Testa subscribes to the protocol of involving the customer early and often in the process of designing and building a product or service or a company. Entrepreneurs are always working with assumptions, and, at minimum, must validate them with customers.

He introduced us to the “Starbucks method” of customer validation. Park yourself in Starbucks, order a beverage of your choice, then look around for likely-looking people who might be open to a brief conversation about your idea or proposal or even prototype. It’s easy to engage people, they’re willing to help, and you can offer to buy them a coffee to lubricate the relationship. A few hours investment of your time and a few dollars invested in coffee will result in a deep, broad and rich set of reactions and responses and a meaningful feedback loop.

Success is more about fitting in than it is about timing.

When writers and historians are trying to analyze the unusual success of a particular business, they often attribute a lot of the cause of the outcome to timing — the product or service or technology came along at just the right time. This is a misinterpretation. The happy correspondence of a new offering with a receptive context is not timing but fitting in.

According to Fabrice, to fit in in a big way is to fit in with the zeitgeist of the era. The dictionary definition of zeitgeist is the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. What Fabrice is pointing towards is a heightened ability to sense the movement of the time, and the direction of its flow, and to step into that river at the right point.

Entrepreneurship is everywhere, and can be achieved at multiple scales.

Super entrepreneurship is not limited by the scale of resources, but it can certainly be augmented wherever resources are abundant. That’s why we seek to encourage entrepreneurship for individuals, teams, and firms of all size, including the largest corporations. Big companies under-perform at entrepreneurship for two reasons. First, they spawn bureaucracy, which is a form of organization that is counter-entrepreneurial. Second, they have existing businesses to defend and fear the consequences of self-disruption.

The solution is to change the purpose of big corporations so that they can become super-entrepreneurial. The purpose would be to create new businesses with no bureaucracy and separated from the defense mechanisms of existing business units or divisions.

Additional Resources

Super-Entrepreneurship Decoded: 5 Secret Keys to Create Breakthrough Businesses that Change the World by Fabrice Testa: Buy It On Amazon

“Super Entrepreneurship” (PDF): Download PDF

Entrepreneurship Is The Most Open System In The World – No Artificial Barriers, Everyone Can Play And Win.

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Critics, protesters, and activists often complain that the capitalist system is closed to non-elites, that the system is “rigged” so that those who already have capital are uniquely able to accumulate more capital, and those without are condemned to always being on the outside looking in.

The opposite is the true case. Markets are the most open system for anyone and everyone to raise their own standard of living by enhancing the quality of life of others, and getting paid for doing so. The name for this mechanism is entrepreneurship. Everybody can be an entrepreneur, and everyone can succeed at it. How so? Because the two essential skills of entrepreneurship are innate in every one of us.

The first is empathy. That means being able to sense when someone else is dissatisfied or disappointed. They wish things were better in some way. They might not be able to articulate precisely how, but they can communicate dissatisfaction to someone who is actually listening to them and paying attention. Dissatisfaction is everywhere; everyone wants things to be better. Dissatisfaction is the universal resource available to everyone who cares to tap into it. Where are there business opportunities? Just listen, you’ll find dissatisfaction – and therefore opportunities – everywhere. 

The second skill is creativity. How can entrepreneurs solve a customer’s dissatisfaction in a new, better, and compelling way? They think of something that no-one has thought of before. They imagine putting together components in a combination that no-one else has tried. They make a suggestion, and see what kind of a response they get. They run some experiments to gain some more information about what might work commercially. Creativity is innate in all people. We’re all unique, we all think differently, we all have ideas that no-one else has. 

So far, so good, you might say. But aren’t a lot of people barred from implementing their business ideas by a lack of – and lack of access to – resources? That’s the wrong way to think. The right way is to assess the resources you do have. Professor Saras Sarasvathy calls this the “bird in the hand” approach. Don’t focus on resources you wish you had. Focus on the resources you do have. In a paper called “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?”, she tells the story of the start-up of U-Haul, a company that today generates over $US4 billion in revenues. Founder Leonard Shoen didn’t have enough resources for a down payment on a house for him and his new wife – and, in fact, he realized that it would have trapped him if he did so. He started a life as a nomad, moving around between in-laws, hauling the family’s goods around in a trailer he made himself. Realizing this might be a market, he found a farm outhouse where he could live and assemble trailers from available materials. With a lot of scrambling and experimenting and partnering and hard work, the U-Haul business was eventually established and stabilized.

Shoen had no business plan. He was never “in control” in any way. He epitomizes an entrepreneurial type that believes that it is impossible to predict or control future outcomes, but it is possible to shape those outcomes. The most productive approach is to take action – whatever action is possible – to shape the yet-to-be-made future.

Who can do this? Anyone. One of the tropes we are required to deal with today is that access to opportunity is restricted – by class, or race, or income level or wealth level or education level or gender or some other individual attribute that is viewed as restricting entry. This is simply not the case. Take, for example, Mauricio Miller, who runs the Community Independence Initiative. This initiative works to unleash entrepreneurship in individuals, families, and groups in some of the poorest parts of the world. Is it a charity? No. Does it help people? Not in the way you might think. In fact, Mauricio believes that trying to help people with charity or training or contributions is exactly the wrong thing to do. Empowering them to think like entrepreneurs is the right thing to do.

stories, data, and research shows that the paternalism of charity slows progress and promotes racial stereotypes.  It is actually a barrier to its own mission.  A focus on weaknesses hides indigenous talent and potential.  There are embedded solutions and leaders in the very communities these experts seek to help.  If, instead, outsider efforts focused on the strengths of low-income families we would all see they are important contributors to society

https://www.ciialternative.org

Mauricio emphasizes indigenous talent and potential. Dale Caldwell, who runs the Entrepreneur Zones program for deprived families in distressed inner cities in the US, likes to cite the historical example of the so-called Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK. In the pre-World War II era, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, segregated African-Americans co-operated with each other to develop a thriving economic community, providing transportation services, hospitality, professional services, construction services, retailing, and manufacturing in the context of the burgeoning oil industry of the times. 

There is no shortage of examples of individuals, families and communities who have carved their own path to prosperity through entrepreneurship. Today’s entrepreneurship is an open method, one based on action rather than resources, and defined by possibilities rather than by existing markets or industries.  Adaptiveness and fluidity provide the dynamics. 

Nothing is closed to aspiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is the fairest system there is. It’s open to everyone in every family, community, town, city and country. It requires ideas and action more than resources. This ideas and actions attractresources, because people want to support – and invest in – the dynamics of entrepreneurship and the who apply them. 

Entrepreneurship is collaborative, characterized by mutual support among fellow-entrepreneurs, supply chain partners, and customers. Entrepreneurs operate in a value generation network that’s open to anyone in the systemic drive to serve everyone.

Entrepreneurship Is The Opposite Of Politics: No Hate, All Love.

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Increasingly, it seems, we are surrounded by and immersed in hate. It is inherent in our political system. Electoral democracy results in parties, those parties are invested in polarization, in winning versus losing, in domination, and in humiliation of the other side. Those who rise to the top in parties are those who can articulate hate most persuasively and most effectively. Angelo Codevilla called the 2-party system a “logic of mutual hate”.

It’s going to get worse, not better. Political parties don’t become more polite, more accommodating, more friendly, less rabid, more rational. They prefer to drive their supporters further apart from those of the other side, rather than bring people together. Now that both the corporate media outlets and the vast majority of the independent media are nakedly partisan, they can’t play any role of amelioration. They cheer on the hatred and throw gasoline on fires.

Happily, there is a different world, with different players, different attitudes, and different motivations. It’s the world of entrepreneurship – a unifying, elevating energy that’s the opposite of the mutual degradation of politics.

Entrepreneurship is ethical and open.

There’s an ethic of entrepreneurship. It’s not just the hard work and dedication and long-term focused effort – important though those undoubtedly are. It’s the service ethic. The entrepreneurial task and commitment is to serve others. To understand their needs and wants and desires and preferences and dreams, and to respond to them by delivering goods and services that deliver them. 

Empathy is the skill that makes this possible. To quote Adam Smith, entrepreneurs want to be loved – that’s what triggers sales and revenue – and to be lovely, i.e. clearly and obviously being deserving of the customer’s love. Empathy is the emotional interchange for this beautiful reciprocity. Empathy enables the entrepreneur to feel what the customer feels, share their dreams and aspirations, and imagine what’s in their imagination for the future.

To enable empathy, communication must be clear and open. There can be no lies or deception or dissembling, otherwise the entrepreneurial ethic could not operate. Misinterpretation is in neither party’s interest – quite the opposite, as understanding exactly what customers want and communicating exactly what the entrepreneur is offering are the essence of free-market exchange. Political communication is too often the opposite: deliberately dissembling and obfuscating.

Entrepreneurship is promises made and promised kept.

Entrepreneurs make promises. Having discovered and carefully and precisely defined the nature of the customer’s need and their preferences about the way it should be fulfilled, the entrepreneurial business designs the right solution and, when the fit is perfect, seeks out the customer to let them know their need can be met. The way of communicating is to make a promise – a promise that the customer’s life will be better through the experience the entrepreneur can deliver. This is a weighty promise, and it must be kept, otherwise there’ be no second chance, and no repeat business. The entrepreneur goes to great trouble to monitor the understanding of the promise, and whether the customer experience matches the expectation that was created by the promise. A failure to keep a promise is a major business setback. If expectations aren’t met – if a delivery or a service call is late, or an item is mis-shipped or a repair is imperfect or software does not run as it should – the business leans over backwards and deploys extra resources to make things better. not only is a reputation with the customer at risk, but also with others that the customer might talk to or with whom they share experiences. Word-of-mouth is a powerful force the entrepreneur wants to keep positive, and keeping promises is the best way to do that.

Politicians make promises too. However, they’re usually meaningless or, worse, deliberately deceptive. Politicians don’t make promises in order to keep them. They make promises in order to get elected. Once they are, they feel released. They could never keep the promise in any case, because they don’t have that much power. They’re just one cog in the party machine. Promises made at the party level are similarly ditched – they can blame changed circumstances, or the opposition or conjure up a thousand other reasons why the promise can’t be kept. Or they just forget their promise, or claim they never made one.

The culture of entrepreneurship is collaborative, helpful, and civilizing.

Entrepreneurs have a heart – a lot of heart. Not only are they devoted to helping people as customers, but they are also collaborative with suppliers, fellow entrepreneurs, and everyone who works with them directly or indirectly. Entrepreneurs realize the value of interconnectivity and sharing. They sense that all entrepreneurs and customers and suppliers are in the system together – the technosphere, the economy, the industry, the local community. They participate in nested networks and systems within systems. It’s collaboration, exchange, and sharing that make systems work. 

Competition has been turned into an ugly word by the dog-eat-dog crowd. It’s part of the hate. Competition is made to seem win-lose, destruction rather than creation. But that’s absolutely the wrong interpretation. Entrepreneurs’ goals are for there to be no competition: to be so unique that the customer will consider no alternative for the very specialized, very personalized service the entrepreneur delivers. Maybe it’s the best quality, maybe it’s the lowest price, maybe it’s the best integration with the customer’s processes – maybe it’s some combination of these that adds up to uniqueness. Maybe it’s exhibiting the deepest understanding of the customer’s business or daily life. In all cases, becoming uniquely qualified in the eyes of the customer is the objective entrepreneurs pursue. Whatever rivalry occurs all accrues to the benefit of the customer – better experiences and better outcomes as a result of the entrepreneurial system.

This entrepreneurial effort and entrepreneurial striving create and build market institutions. The internet is open so that all entrepreneurs can use it. Would political parties have built it that way? Amazon builds a third-party seller platform that any digital retailer can use. Apple builds an app store that any software developer can qualify to join. Google builds a search bar that we all use and we all make more useful the more we use it. True there’s some hate creeping in around the edges of some of these institutions, but it’s not entrepreneurs who are causing it.

The institutions of entrepreneurship are the bedrock of civilization. In Gallup polls of national confidence, small business (a proxy for entrepreneurs) is rated at 70% (i.e. people say they have a great deal or a lot of confidence in small business as an institution), compared to Congress at 12%. The average US institution stands at 33%. Entrepreneurs must earn people’s trust every day, and they clearly do a better job of it than politicians. 

Entrepreneurship is positive and inspiring. It’s problem-solving. It’s generous and giving. It’s also busy and industrious with no time for politics and the hatred that comes with politics. Let’s promote a culture of entrepreneurship. Let’s teach our kids in school from the earliest age. Let’s teach them creativity and empathy and risk acceptance. Let’s teach them to be entrepreneurs. Let’s encourage everyone to be entrepreneurial. We’ll enjoy a better world.

The US Is Compounding Its Shortfalls In Innovation. Make Sure That In Your Business – And In Your Life – You Are Compounding Positively.

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Curt Carlson, the world’s leading authority on innovation and how to implement it, worries that the US is under-performing on this front – badly. 

On LinkedIn, he writes:

Almost all measures of innovative performance today are wanting.  Only 3% of patents recoup their investment; the rest are mostly waste that costs many tens of billions of dollars a year just in maintenance fees.  Only one in ten new venture-backed companies has any real success.  Most venture capitalists lose money, and 5% make 95% of the gains.  Only 20% of university tech-transfer programs break even, and those few are often the result of a new drug.  In our workshops with almost a thousand global teams from leading companies, universities, and government agencies, typically, only 25% of the projects under development would provide any meaningful new customer value if completed.  

This issue profoundly affects civilizational progress and quality of life. Innovation is value-creation and value-creation improves society for all.

Through innovation we address society’s grand challenges, create prosperity and jobs, and provide resources for social responsibility.  Consequently, one of society’s most critical opportunities is to improve our value-creation capabilities.  Improvements in value creation are exponential amplifiers of innovative performance.

He applies the term exponential in a carefully considered way. There is the opportunity for rapid, accelerated advance from where we are today to where we could be tomorrow. Problems can be solved quickly. Conditions we experience as disappointing or even dismal can become uplifting and exciting in a short period of time.

That is, if we are innovating and generating new value.

The opposite is also true, however. Compounding works in reverse. If we fall behind, the distance we have to go to recover becomes exponentially longer. If this year, we realize only 50% of our value creation potential, then next year or in the next relevant period, we’ll have 50% of the resources we would otherwise have had, and we’ll drop to 25% of potential, and so on and so on. The shortfall compounds and our level of performance declines exponentially.

Professor Per Bylund of Oklahoma State University has the same concern about our country’s economic under-performance. He gives a name to the gap between the value that’s actually created by entrepreneurial businesses and what could have been created: The Unrealized. In his book The Seen, The Unseen, And The Unrealized, he describes this value generation shortfall in economic terms, and attributes it to government regulation. Whether in the form of legislation or bureaucratic rule-making, regulation distorts the market, redirecting entrepreneurial creativity into channels favored by politicians and government departments, or curtailing it with enforcement rules, or prohibiting it entirely in some cases. The regulated economy simply can’t evolve and grow in the same way it would if unhampered.

The Unrealized is, similarly, a compounding problem. The number of regulations increases each year, so The Unrealized expands and grows each year. If the economy grew at only 50% of its potential in a base year, then the next year is constrained in the base from which it grows, and this negative compounding extends annually into the future, forever. Since regulation has been with us for a couple of centuries, the compounding of The Unrealized is incalculably high. We simply can’t imagine the dimensions of what could have been. 

Einstein famously said about compound interest that it “is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it…..he who doesn’t….pays it”.

Unsurprisingly, given the source, this is a very important observation. Compounding can work for us or against us. Saving and investing and re-investing can compound in our favor. Interacting more and more with smarter and smarter people can compound in our favor. Iterating a creative idea in critical forums can compound its innovativeness and applicability until it breaks into the market. Exercising and healthy eating every day can compound for us as we age, making us relatively more and more healthy than our age cohort and standard norms. 

The same is true on the negative side. As Einstein said, if we don’t earn compound interest, we pay it. If we get into debt, interest is working against us, especially if we borrow more and more. If we are not continuously engaged with other smart people and iterating our ideas with them, we are less and less likely to make a creative breakthrough. And if we permit ourselves to avoid fitness activities and if we eat an unhealthy diet every day, we are making things worse for ourselves at compounding rates. Every day we are a little less healthy and fit than we could have been – every daily sugar intake, or alcohol intake or cigarette smoke intake compounds, so that, every day, the impact of unfitness and bad diet is a little more harmful on our less-fit body than it would otherwise have been.

Curt Carlson and Per Bylund teach us to concern ourselves with the compounding of The Unrealized in value generation activities. We should bear this in mind – and, at the same time, make sure that compounding is working for us in our personal and family life.

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