 I'm thinking of changing the title of my book The Natural Enterprise to Now How Am I Going to Make a Living?
When I originally wrote it, I wanted to share with young people in
university and high school the wisdom I had learned from advising over
150 entrepreneurs over my career with Ernst & Young. Specifically I
wanted to explain to them, through real-life examples, how so much of
the conventional wisdom of entrepreneurship is wrong. Specifically I
wanted to debunk these powerful myths:
- That entrepreneurship is a lonely, solitary undertaking.
- That entrepreneurship has to be stressful and an enormous amount of work.
- That entrepreneurship, while it may be 'worth it', is not much fun.
- That entrepreneurship requires mortgaging your company and soul to bankers or venture capitalists.
- That entrepreneurs have to constantly grow to stay 'competitive', and sometimes must compromise their principles to do it.
- That entrepreneurship requires a lot of up-front detailed planning.
- That entrepreneurship, to succeed, requires a bit of genius and a lot of luck.
- That entrepreneurs should be clever imitators rather than innovators.
I
certainly know plenty of entrepreneurs who believed these things, and
some of them succeeded, if rather joylessly. But I also know some
entrepreneurs whose extraordinary success belies all of these myths.
Entrepreneurs who are enormously collaborative, and trusting of their
partners. Entrepreneurs who lead such 'easy' lives that they are almost
embarrassed by the "Oh, you must have to work so hard to have succeeded
so well!" comments of admirers, and who shun the limelight as a result.
Entrepreneurs who love getting up each day and going to work, who owe
nothing to anyone, who choose not to grow because they make more than
enough just doing good work for delighted customers. Entrepreneurs who
do everything experimentally and improvisationally, and find that their
decisions are far better than those who plan way in advance in
excruciating detail. Entrepreneurs who aren't especially smart, but are
keen observers of unmet needs, and excellent researchers.
When I
have spoken to graduating classes in universities, to teenagers, and to
young people just starting out in low-paying jobs for companies and
bosses that they don't particularly like but who tease them with the
promise of promotion, they were astonished to hear this, and wanted to
learn more. They had never imagined
themselves as entrepreneurs because they'd heard the conventional
wisdom bulleted above and concluded they just didn't have what it takes.
That was the genesis of The Natural Enterprise.
It was to be a book to give struggling and unhappy young people the
knowledge and courage to start and operate their own sustainable
business, with others who shared their passion and values. Having
learned a lot of useless information in school and MBA classes, they
would be asking themselves the question Now How Am I Going to Make a Living? with the emphasis on the last word. My book would help them answer that question, and free them from a life of wage slavery.
But
as I wrote the book, and started to spend time with boomer generation
people who were being outsourced, downsized, offshored, early-retired,
or just plain hated their jobs and were itching to quit, I realized there were even more of them asking the same question, but with the emphasis on the first word: Now How Am I Going to Make a Living? They have since become the main intended audience for the book.
Thanks
to the insights from my wonderful agent and some very generous
publishers, the book has been evolving quickly from a 'how to' manual (still reflected in the chapters I have published online) to more of a conversation with the reader about:
- my
own decision to leave a well-paying job that I no longer enjoyed (after
27 years!), and what I have since learned about the process of deciding
what to do next,
- the stories of several unusual entrepreneurs I
know who are having the time of their lives doing what they love and do
well, successfully and sustainably in accordance with their personal
principles and values, easily and joyfully working with people they
love, trust and respect, and
- the unhappy stories of some other
entrepreneurs I know who made fatal errors, mostly by following
conventional wisdom but sometimes just through easily-avoided errors of
judgement, and failed miserably (their names, of course, will be
anonymous in the book).
The book is hence becoming a map of the journey to joyful, successful, natural
entrepreneurship, that will help readers, young and bewildered or old
and disenchanted, to find their way, no matter where they are starting
from today. Its purpose will be to help the reader decide whether she or he is ready for entrepreneurship (by debunking the myths and explaining what entrepreneurship is really about), and, if so, to help her or him decide what entrepreneurial business to establish, and, just as importantly, with whom.
That will probably, now, be the scope of the book -- explaining the
work of actually getting it up and running will be deferred to another
book, or perhaps, because it is so context-dependent, may become a
service I offer (online or off) rather than the subject of a book at
all. Perhaps that service will be my own Natural Enterprise.
The
online forum that was to accompany the book will still exist, but its
emphasis will be more on helping readers talk through the issues of the
book (is entrepreneurship right for me, and if so, in what business and
with whom) in their own personal context, rather than sharing of
'how-to' tips on Natural Enterprise startups and day-to-day operations.
I hope that it will become a popular enough destination that it will be
the site of choice for people looking for like-minds with whom to
establish a Natural Enterprise.
I still like the idea of The
Natural Enterprise, and it will probably continue to be the model used
in the book. I believe strongly (and my experience with successful
Natural Enterprises reinforces that belief) that there are inherent
advantages to
- a non-hierarchical 'partnership' form of enterprise, with partners who have complementary skills,
- building
your enterprise for sustainability, and financing it organically,
rather than making it dependent on continuous growth and outside
capital,
- basing your enterprise on a shared (with your
partners) set of values and principles that include responsibility not
just to 'shareholders' but to the whole community in which you do
business, and
- 'naturally' starting by discovering unmet needs
you can fill innovatively, and letting customers market your
innovations virally for you, rather than starting with ideas and
solutions and then trying to sell them to a market.
I'd be grateful for your thoughts on where the book is going. Would you buy a book called Now How Am I Going to Make a Living? If the book was focused on helping you decide what you want to do to make a living, and with whom, rather than on how to set it up,
would that make it better or worse? And is there room for the Natural
Enterprise model in it, or am I being too idealistic and trying to
force this model too far ahead of its time? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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