When my old friend
and former business partner Tom Peters heard
that I was keen on researching and teaching
entrepreneurship, he warned, "You can say
everything that needs to be said about
entrepreneurship in one paragraph."
The implication was clear: Stick with
the big-business management stuff he had
written about in his best-selling book In
Search of Excellence.
Well, twenty-five
years (including four delightful years of
writing this column) and three books of my
own later, I'd have to say that either the
great Tom Peters got it wrong or it's taken
me a hell of a long time to get that
paragraph just right. Of course, who
could blame Peters or anyone else for
pooh-poohing my newfound interest in
entrepreneurs way back in 1983? It was
still all about management in those days.
Starting a small business was something you
did if you couldn't get a "real job" at a
Fortune 500 blue-chip outfit like GM or IBM
or Citibank.
How shortsighted!
People simply hadn't yet recognized that
entrepreneurship was the greatest
economic-growth tool ever invented and that
entrepreneurship, not big business, was to
become the real engine of prosperity around
the world...
