I posted a link yesterday to what I thought was one of the most encouraging studies I’ve seen in a long time. FedEx found that 10% of Americans already own a business and 56% dream of it. Cool, right? Well I thought so. But it appears that some may not agree that this is such good news.
Bill Wellborn, editor of the Memphis Business Journal, finds this study to be, well, here are his own words:
“I was flabbergasted. I was floored. I was fairly shocked at this revelation.” In fact, he believes that such entrepreneurial dreaming is a “threat to the US economy.’ Why does Mr. Wellborn think that this study is so “shocking”?
His first concern is that companies like FedEx should be worried about what this means for their own employees. That horse, I’m afraid left the barn a long time ago. Part of the cause of this trend in attitudes about entrepreneurship is that the baby boom generation is the first to have the “corporate myth” (i.e., go to work for a big company and they will take care of you for the rest of your life) shattered. Our generation was laid off, down-sized, and generally treated like an expendable resource. We became known simply as FTE’s in the companies in which we worked. And when a company had too many of these FTE’s, the edict went out to cut that number to an acceptable level.
This reality hit home with me when I got back into teaching about six years ago. When I left university teaching in the 1980’s, I had just started a new entrepreneurship program. It was an up hill battle to say the least. I had faculty screaming at me in the hallway that I was going to ruin the prestige of the College of Business with a program like this. “We are not here to prepare students to become a bunch of merchants, after all.” I had parents calling me and accusing me of brainwashing their children. They didn’t work all these years to pay for college for them to waste it on a degree in entrepreneurship. They were to major in business and go to work in a good solid corporation. These attitudes are part of the reason that I left academia and went into business for myself.
Fast forward ten years into the mid-1990’s. I came back into academia only to find that the world had fundamentally changed. Our economy was no longer driven by the large corporations, but rather by entrepreneurs. Faculty welcomed my return, and parents (many of who had been down-sized themselves) were actually pushing their children to study and become entrepreneurs so they would never have to go through what their parents had over the past decade.
FedEx and other corporations may actually have to create a work environment that competes not only with other large companies, but with the real possibility of leaving that company and starting a venture. And yes, maybe some of these ventures may eventually compete with FedEx. I thought our system was based on the premise that competition is good! Such competitive forces are what make this economy vibrant and strong rather than being sources of its destruction.
Mr. Wellborn wonders what would happen if all that dream of starting a business all decided to act on this at once. It would lead to massive business failure, forcing everyone to work at Wal-Mart. If this actually happened, I suppose it would be a mess. But, it won’t. And what we should do is look at the challenge that we now face to prepare America to be really ready to start a business when the right time and opportunity arise. We need to educate all Americans about entrepreneurship and economics. Although Wellborn throws out the worn out statistics of business failures, we have to at the same time recognize that those who are properly trained in business formation consistently succeed at rates of 80% or better after five years. (I know I keep harping on this, but bad facts take time to correct).
So relax. We don’t need to look at this transformation as a bad thing. The glass is not half full (or shattered all over the kitchen floor as Wellborn seems to think). This is a new time in this country when we have the opportunity to reinvent our economy all over again into an even better, and more evenly distributed I might add, system than it has ever been before.