I’m writing a book, and the first chapter is starting to come together. The central claim is one I have been circling for years, and I want to share where it lands.
The claim is simple to state and harder to live with. Entrepreneurship is not business. The two have been collapsed for so long that the distinction sounds almost strange when you say it out loud. But the collapse is the source of an enormous amount of suffering in the lives of entrepreneurs, and untangling it changes how you do the work.
For about a decade, I served on the leadership team of a business plan competition, and one of my responsibilities was assigning coaches to the competing entrepreneurs. The coaches we recruited were almost always senior people from large companies. Marketing VPs. Finance directors. They knew business, often at a level the entrepreneurs could not match. And yet the advice they gave kept missing. The entrepreneurs would sit through coaching sessions and feel something off, without being able to name what. The coaches were held up as experts. The entrepreneurs felt stupid. The advice often got refused, but not for any reason anyone could articulate. It took me years to understand what I was watching. The coaches knew business. They did not know entrepreneurship. And those are not the same practice.
What “Entrepreneur” Actually Means
The word entrepreneur comes from the French entreprendre, to undertake or to originate. It points at the act of beginning, at the moment when something that did not exist comes to exist. That is the creative core of entrepreneurship, and almost no business education touches it. If you draw a flow chart of any business, you can find a box in the middle that says, in effect, magic happens here. Business has built a sophisticated infrastructure around that box. What it has not done is teach people how to be the person inside the box.
The work inside the box is the work of innovation, and innovation has been so misused as a word that we need to recover its meaning. Most people use it as a synonym for invention. They are not the same. Invention is the creation of a new object or idea. Innovation is the practice of getting human beings to change their practices in a way that persists after you are gone. People invent things constantly that no one uses. An innovation is harder, because it requires mobilizing human beings.
That distinction leads to another. Management is the control of things to produce a desired outcome. Leadership is the influence of human behavior. Both have a place, but they are not the same skill. You can manage your way to a reasonably efficient organization. You cannot manage your way to one that innovates.
The Great Drift
How did we end up here? For most of human history, we worked alongside animals and weather and other people, none of which can really be controlled. You influence a horse. You prepare for the weather. You negotiate with other people. Then we built machines, and machines could be controlled. The scientific management revolution at the start of the twentieth century took the experience of controlling machines and tried to extend it to the workplace. The premise produced enormous efficiency gains in factories, and that success convinced an entire generation that the same approach should apply everywhere. We inherited a model of business that treats human beings as objects to be managed, and we kept that model long after the conditions that justified it had passed.
Fear Gets Compliance. Cherishing Gets Everything Else.
Human beings are not objects. People will act for the sake of an obligation, a threat, or an opportunity. Threat is the most potent in the short term. Fear gets fast compliance, and in a narrow sense it is extremely effective. But fear engages only a thin slice of a person. If your business requires people to think, to invent, to extend themselves, to bring the whole of themselves to the table, then fear is not just insufficient. It is in the way.
The only thing that produces that level of engagement is what I have come to call cherishing, the practice of holding another person’s concerns as if they were your own, and designing the work so that their flourishing and the flourishing of the business reinforce each other. People crave leaders who see them, who care about them, who will not betray their concerns, and who treat them fairly.
I saw this for myself at Sun Microsystems. The teams I worked on operated on these principles. People were trusted. People were cherished. Initiative was expected, not requested. The best people gravitate toward this kind of organization, because excellent people will not work for fear-based ones once they have a choice. And the productivity becomes shocking, including the kinds of outcomes that simply cannot be commanded into existence.
The Orientation Move
Entrepreneurship is the practice of influencing human behavior in the service of bringing something valuable into the world. It is its own discipline, distinct from business as it is usually taught, and worth recovering on its own terms.
Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach & Founder of Livingston Entrepreneurial Academy
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