The Spirit Of Independence;

"We have lived through the age of big industry and the age of the giant corporation. But I believe that this is the age of the entrepreneur." -- Ronald Reagan

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It was only last March that President Reagan, speaking to a Wall Street crowd, made his pronouncement about the age of the entrepreneur. Like most official charistenings, it came a little late: Entrepreneurship has been a buzzword of choice for a few years. Giant corporations, bureaucracies atremble, have proclaimed their born-again entrepreneurial souls. Pundits and professors have reported and dissected the new age's Horatio Alger tales -- beginning in a garage and ending, thanks to luck and pluck, in an initial public offering.

Out beyond the cliche and hype, however, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something real is taking place. The numbers alone tell a compelling story. In 1980, according to Dun & Bradstreet Corp., 533,520 new businesses incorporated in the United States. By 1984, the figure was up to a record-breaking 634,991, with 1,748,584 in the intervening three years. Even when the paper corporations and the quick failures are weeded out, the trend is unmistakable. Along with the new businesses have come new jobs -- more than 20 million in 10 years, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher David Birch's well-massaged figures -- and new products, indeed whole new industries. Ten years ago, who would have known what to make of a new company whose chief product was, say, CMOS electrically erasable memory chips? Who would have imagined franchised legal-services clinics or a host of feisty new regional airlines?

For three months this year, as winter turned to spring, I traveled across the United States, tape recorder in hand, asking people what they thought about this age of the entrepreneur. I went wherever curiosity led me, on the road from New York to Los Angeles, from Anchorage to Miami. I stopped in Amarillo, Tex.; in Wausau, Wis.; in Boulder, Colo.; and Sterling, Ill. -- and in many, many places in between. The people I talked with were not, I confess, a wholly random sample. I wanted to hear what the chief executive officer of IBM Corp. thought about the entrepreneurial revival. (A busy man, John Akers provided me with a few remarks taped earlier, as did William Hewlett and David Packard, the founders of Hewlett Packard Co.) I wanted to visit oil raider T. Boone Pickens, and to talk with the telephone operator at Apple Computer Inc. I wanted to see what was becoming of the South Side of Chicago, where the smokestacks have been stilled, as well as Silicon Valley. I wondered if Mary Kay Ash, who started her $277.5-million cosmetics giant in 1963, thought it was easier for a woman to start her own business today. I wanted to meet a man who had bet his life savings on a franchise of the now-bankrupt Pizza Time Theatres Inc. restaurant chain, once home of Chuck E. Cheese.

I wanted to listen. Not to analyze, and not to quantify. I hoped, through the voices of the men and women involved, to capture a portrait of the current entrepreneurial moment. I say current, because entrepreneurship is nothing new. It is as American as W. K. Kellogg's original Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co., or the once-struggling Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which a man named Thomas Watson Sr. renamed International Business Machines. It is as familiar as Henry Ford's automobiles or Ray Kroc's hamburger stands -- the rights to which Kroc bought from Maurice and Richard McDonald for $2.7 million almost 25 years ago. In the 1890s, and again in the 1920s, there was the same explosion in start-ups, in new technologies, and in new products that we are seeing today. The fractional-horsepower electric motor was as radical a technology in its day as the micro-processor, and Ford's assembly line at Highland Park, Mich., as novel an organizing principle as any hightech skunkworks along Massachusetts Route 128.

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