Where is Value Created?

There is one term missing from the Administration's Budget and Stimulus package, the entrepreneur, the value creator. Just what is an entrepreneur. Well simply put, it is that person, who despite all odds, has an idea, works alone until they can convince a core group of fellow believers, and then endlessly pursues any and all resources necessary to achieve their goal. The entrepreneur eschews Government support, the entrepreneur is driven by the desire to get people to buy his creation. Frequently the drive of the entrepreneur is market acceptance not abject personal wealth accumulation.

The Bankers on Wall Street are wealth accumulators and not value creators. The management of large corporations fall likewise in a similar patch. Both are in many ways the antithesis of the entrepreneur. All too often the entrepreneur's objective is the continuing acceptance of their creation, and the expansion and extension of that creation. Jobs of Apple is an example of the entrepreneur who despite the displacement of the classic corporate type in Scully, managed to expand Pixar, create Next, and then return and reinvent Apple. A similar person was Olsen at DEC, albeit there was an end to his run, failing in a reinvention as the PC came along.

The entrepreneur seeks to get to the other side of the mountain. The entrepreneur will go over the mountain, under the mountain, around the mountain, through the mountain or even turn around and walk all around the earth in the other direction to get to the other side. It is potentially and endless process of goal attainment. The entrepreneur does not demand Government money, there is not a single entrepreneur who has stepped up to the counter with their hand out because the culture, the ethos, of the entrepreneur is against such. Akin to the monks of old, who adhered to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the entrepreneur can readily adhere to the first two, but the good entrepreneur is fundamentally disobedient, they seek what they have been told they cannot do, it is the trend towards disobedience that drives them.

There are few if any entrepreneurs in Russia, a small number in Europe, some in China, but the United States owes its very existence to that spirit. The current Administration takes not only little notice of them, but almost refuses to recognize their existence. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps as this economy goes through its melt down there will be a reawakening of the entrepreneur, not the pseudo-Internet entrepreneur who create wealth by a tweaking of some incremental change, but the true American entrepreneur who strikes out on their own to create something fundamentally new. For American entrepreneurs are fundamentally individuals who flourish in adversity.

It will be the entrepreneurs and only the entrepreneurs who will create new value in this society, not the Government spending programs. I am continually drawn back to the 1960s and the Kennedy Space Program, a massive Government effort which sucked the best and brightest technical people into Government service and then in the early 1970s dropped them all on the street. The result of the 1960s effort was the rise of Japan in the 1980s, since the United States did Government non-value creating work for a decade, the result of the 1970s wilderness was the technological explosion of the 1980s and 1990s.

Regrettably the entrepreneurs in our Graduate schools are almost all foreign nationals, bright and creative, and the fear is that this time, this massive Government effort, will result in the 2010s and 2020s being the upsurge of China's and India's entrepreneurs, raised in the crucible of America and discharged as a result of the current Government Stimulus and Budget social restructurings. The result, if you think we have economic problems now, just wait!