This is a truly awesome post, which I recommend anyone interested in entrepreneurship should take a look at.
There is a great quote I came by from an HBS entrpreneurship professor (I forget the source). Entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”.
In order to do that, you do need to score strongly on Mark Suster’s 12 criteria.
And if you look at some of his criteria its clear that that are determinants could be driven by what happens in utero.
Take for example risk taking in high-frequency financial trading which can be predicted by the second-to-fourh digit ratio on a hand (http://bit.ly/ce15Bb). Coates et al point to prenatal androgens (i.e. testosterone levels in the womb) as having important organizing effects in the brain, resulting in different adult behaviours.
And as you point out, the effects are not linear or totally deterministic.
There are those who become entrepreneurs because they have little other choice. Look at immigrants arriving at a new country, who don’t have access to traditional professions or jobs. They often do have access to extended community networks which allow them to build businesses serving those communities. If the timing is right, as for many Indian migrants to the UK in the 1950s and 60s, great businesses can emerge.
There are those who may have many pop out of the womb on the far end of the distribution, but emerge in cultures where the things that can make one an entrepreneur are not valued. The pastiche of this would be the high-performing child who is driven back to the fat-middle of law or consulting by school, college and parental pressure. I am sure this group keeps many a psychiatrist and divorce lawyer in business as they hit their forties and reality dawns.
I don’t think entrepreneurship can be taught. Because teaching is today, in some way, about closing down to frameworks and models.
I was lucky to hear Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Marti Ahtisaari, speak at DLD on the subject of conflict resolution. And he said that there were no models that could be applied to conflict resolution. Every situation was different. There were patterns you could draw on but little else.
My own experience is that the frameworks are helpful–to the extent that you pay them five minutes notice, process them and then just get on with it. The problem with being ‘taught’ (in a six week or ten week module) entrepreneurship, is that it’s a bit like learning to read a map. When you actually get on the terrain it looks and feels very much more different. There is so much more noise and so many inadequate simplifications on the map. (Not least of which is the fact that the terrain may harbour threats or opportunities not captured by the cartographer).
What I am certain is that entrepreneurship can be analysed. And data can be produced. And it can be used to drive web traffic on blogs.
I look at my experience over the past decade. I am doing a very much better job today (at 37) than I was at 27 (when you were running BuildOnline — whose offices were across the hall from our annex in 42 Brook St). It isn’t the availability of frameworks, although I do occasionally use them, it is.
I have far better pattern matching. To the 10,000 hours of Gladwell — I have an extra c. 25000 hours of waking, business experience — to bring to bear, to spot patterns, to make quick judgements.
I have much more experience. I have spent the equivalent of 3 yrs in technology sales, 3 years in tech marketing; 3 yrs in tech direction/architecture, years in people management, on top of what I had in 1999. It doesn’t make me a black belt or a guru in these areas by any means, but it allows me to go very deep in my discussions with any of the teams.
This isn’t about nature–this is about nurture.
But where nurture –and certainly early childhood development–has made a difference is in fostering that belief that you can pursue an opportunity. That what you have around you (in terms of resources and talent) isn’t the only thing you can rely on. That if you want to make it happen, you can.
What I’ve seen in many people who want to be entrepreneurs, but after beautiful powerpoint slides can’t get started, is this hang-up of our modernist thinking which may begin with Saint-Simon and progresses through our scientism, and perhaps culminating logical positivism. The same ‘fact-based’ ‘model-the-world’ thinking that came out of Newton and reached warp speed in the 19th century and the Royal Insitution, that persuaded political economists to be physicists and build models of the world, seems to cast a dark shadow of our ability to dream the impossible–and get on with it.
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